This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 18 episode of “The ReidOut.”
On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump said he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Trump has pledged to begin those deportations on his very first day in office.
“On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” he told the crowd at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York City last month.
1 in every 25 families in America who know someone and love someone who is undocumented.
Trump talks a lot about going after “criminals,” but what does that mean in practice? Technically, if you cross the border illegally, you’ve broken the law. So are all those people who came over the border criminals at risk of deportation under Trump?
Out of 130 million households in the United States, about 5.6 million include undocumented immigrants, according to Pew Research Center data. That’s 1 in every 25 families in America who know someone and love someone who is undocumented. This is not siloed.
In response to Trump’s promise to use the military to assist with his deportation effort, the American Civil Liberties Union’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said his organization is already working with blue states to map out their response.
Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Maura Healey of Massachusetts and JB Pritzker of Illinois are all discussing how they’re going to safeguard their undocumented communities. They know one of the things that Trump does very well is unleashing terror against his adversaries, and in this case, that will be blue states. We’ll see something very different play out in red states, like Texas. There will likely be huge investments in detention camps. The mass deportation of millions will become a source of revenue. Some of these privately run, for-profit centers are already under investigation for coercing detainees into working for a wage as low as $1 a day — essentially indentured servitude. Under Trump’s incoming administration, millions of undocumented people and those who love them could suffer as others make millions of dollars off the sweat and labor of broken families. Allison Detzel contributed.
María Teresa Kumar
María Teresa Kumar is an MSNBC columnist, contributor and the president and CEO of Voto Latino, a digital-first organization dedicated to educating, engaging and empowering the Latinx community to register to vote and make its voice heard at the polls.
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