Donald Trump still loves a border wall, so much so that he’ll even do a photo-op in front of one built during his predecessor Barack Obama’s administration. But as a policy promise and a symbol of what can be expected from a future Trump presidency, the wall has been replaced in favor of a program of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. The organizers of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month even printed signs reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” for delegates to wave with glee.
The idea has an understandable if vulgar appeal: If people are here illegally, just make them leave. If that’s unpleasant for them, it’s no more than they deserve for violating immigration laws. But if we consider what would be involved in mass deportation, it becomes clear that Trump is promising something that’s shocking in its brutality, overwhelming in its logistical challenge and unprecedented — not only in American history, but in the history of the world.
On NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, host Kristen Welker asked Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, about the millions of families of mixed status, in which at least one parent is undocumented but a spouse or a child is a legal resident or a citizen. Would families simply be broken up? After dodging the question a few times while claiming he was eager to answer it, Vance finally said, “I think you of course have a number of children who are currently living with drug cartel members, not actually their families.” That’s not exactly reassuring to those families that a Trump administration would treat them as something other than criminals.
Trump is promising something that’s shocking in its brutality, overwhelming in its logistical challenge and unprecedented — not only in American history, but in the history of the world.
Asked the same question about family separation three days before, Trump said only, “We’ll work on that,” which means he hasn’t given it any thought. As for how the mass deportation of undocumented people would work, he offered a predictably simple-minded explanation: “We’ll work with locals — and they’re going to bring them to us — and we’ll get them over the border, and we’ll make arrangements with the countries, and the countries will accept them back, and if they don’t accept them back, we do no trade with those countries, and we charge them big tariffs.”
Bada-bing, bada-boom. All taken care of.
When Trump talks about mass deportation, he speaks as if every undocumented immigrant’s name and address are on a list and law enforcement can just knock on their doors and politely remove them. But the reality is far different.
The most widely accepted number for the undocumented population is 11 million, though that is an approximation (Trump and other Republicans claim it’s twice as high or more). How is the government going to find and remove 11 million people if it doesn’t know who they are?
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws within the interior of the country, made 416,000 arrests last year; the agency clearly doesn’t have anything near the resources to arrest 26 times as many people. In fact, according to FBI statistics, every law enforcement agency in America — every police department and sheriff’s department, every state police troop, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and so on — combine to make about 10 million arrests per year. So even if you recruited every law enforcement official in the country to this effort, you’d be doubling their workload, and they still wouldn’t reach every undocumented resident.
Trump says he wants to deploy the military to do the job. And how would that work? Would soldiers descend on states and cities with large immigrant populations and go house to house demanding that everyone show their papers? I can remember when Republicans were the ones warning about “jack-booted government thugs” deploying “Gestapo tactics.”
They might show up at workplaces where they suspect significant numbers of undocumented people are working, but such raids are usually rare and planned far in advance. Once they line up, say, a hundred workers outside a factory, how would those workers prove their legal status? A birth certificate or a passport is necessary to prove citizenship, and how many people take one of those documents to work every day? Would the military just arrest everyone with an accent and sort them out later?
About 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps during World War II. That was about one-one hundredth of the size of what Trump proposes.
Legal residents and U.S. citizens would inevitably be wrongly arrested in huge numbers before they could prove their status, if they ever did, in what would be unlikely to be a smoothly run operation (this is a Trump enterprise, don’t forget). And where would you put the millions who’d been rounded up while this process of figuring out who is and isn’t a legal resident played out? Ghoulish Trump adviser Stephen Miller envisions vast camps near the southern border; just imagine dumping people there by the hundreds of thousands at a time and what it would take to provide food, shelter and sanitation for them.
Immigrants, including those who are undocumented, live in almost every state, county and city in America. Arresting this many of them would be chaotic, terrifying and often violent. Think of how you’d react if someone busted into your house and tried to take members of your family away. Basic civil rights would be violated on a scale unprecedented in American history. About 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps during World War II, a program we now properly regard as abominable, and that was about one-one hundredth of the size of what Trump proposes. In fact, no country has ever removed 11 million people from within its territory; to find roundups on anything even approaching that scale, you have to look to the history of genocide in places such as Germany and Cambodia. That’s not to mention the economic consequences of mass deportation. Like it or not, undocumented people not only do critical work in a variety of industries including farming, construction and food production; they also pay billions of dollars in taxes every year. As one recent review of economic literature on the subject concluded, mass deportation “would shrink the U.S. economy, cause American workers to lose jobs, reduce the wages of U.S. citizens, lose the taxes paid by deported unauthorized immigrants and worsen the finances of federal, state and local governments.” Trump’s mass deportation plan is his most consequential economic promise, far more than cutting taxes or increasing tariffs, and it would be an economic disaster. Perhaps Trump’s mass deportation would be akin to his promise to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it: something that was never going to happen the way he described it but which thrilled his supporters all the same. They love to imagine Trump snapping his fingers like Thanos and making all the undocumented immigrants disappear, without muss or fuss. Yet for all his rancid white nationalism, Trump couldn’t make immigrants disappear, as hard as he tried. This is still a country where immigrants are an essential part of our economic and cultural life, just as they have always been. We can’t know whether Trump believes what he says, but his people are certainly acting like they’re serious. “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” his former ICE director Tom Homan said in July. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.” Even if Trump can’t accomplish what he promises, he’s likely at the very least to attempt some form of it. And we all ought to be afraid.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
