What ‘Mass Deportation’ Might Look Like
Turning a campaign slogan into policy.
![](https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/mass-deportation-now-republican-convention-1024x683.webp)
President-Elect Donald Trump placed “the border” at the center of his re-election campaign, pledging “mass deportation.” At least 11 million people are living in the United States in violation of our immigration laws. Many of us have argued that there’s no feasible way to deport all of them and that any attempt to do so would be at a horrific humanitarian cost.
We’re about to find out the administration’s actual policies and how much support he can get for them in a Republican-majority Congress.
WSJ (“Trump Advisers Ramp Up Work on Mass Deportation Push“):
Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are drawing up plans to carry out his mass deportation pledge, including discussing how to pay for it and weighing a national emergency declaration that would allow the incoming administration to repurpose military assets to detain and remove migrants.
The behind-the-scenes discussions, which started months before the election and have picked up in the days since Trump’s victory, include policy changes required to increase deportations, according to people working on the presidential transition, members of Congress and others close to the president-elect.
Among the changes: revoking a Biden administration policy directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to pursue immigrants in the country illegally who haven’t committed other crimes, and making changes to the immigration court system to speed up cases. Trump’s allies have said they are planning first to focus on immigrants in the country illegally who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court, of which there are about 1.3 million, as well as those with other criminal convictions or charges.
That’s still an enormous number of people, but also the least controversial subset to target. The former have already received due process and the latter will surely evoke the least sympathy.
As a first step, Trump’s advisers are discussing issuing a national emergency declaration at the border on his first day in office, which his team thinks would allow him to move money from the Pentagon to pay for wall construction and to assist with immigrant detention and deportation. But the legality of such a move is unclear. A national emergency, Trump’s advisers think, also would unlock the ability to use military bases for immigrant detention and military planes to help carry out deportations.
Trump has a more competent set of advisors this time than he had in 2016 (which, granted, is a low bar). It’s quite possible that they have actually researched the legality of these moved and believe they have a plausible case to make that the President would have this power.
Still, I’m skeptical. If Presidents can simply take appropriated funds and repurpose them as they see fit by declaring “an emergency,” then Congress’ primary Constitutional authority—the power of the purse—is meaningless. While Congressional Republicans have proven themselves spineless in the face of pressure from Trump, I’d think they would be resistant to taking large sums from the Defense budget for what amounts to domestic law enforcement. Similarly, while the Roberts Court has issued some shocking pro-Trump rulings, allowing the President to arrogate to himself powers clearly delegated to the Congress would seem a bridge too far.
A critical near-term priority is finding the money to pay for it. An estimate by the American Immigration Council, a liberal immigration group, estimated that an operation to deport the total number of people living in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over more than a decade, or roughly $88 billion a year.
Any deportation effort requires enormous resources to hire more federal agents to identify and arrest immigrants, contract out space to detain them and procure airplanes to fly them to other countries.
Trump has played down the projected cost of his plan. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News this week, “when people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”
While estimates from a group devoted to opposing this plan should naturally be taken with a large pinch of salt, it’s certainly true that this plan would be logistically challenging and quite expensive.
Officials from Trump’s first administration have also written draft executive orders to resume construction of the border wall and revise President Biden’s existing restrictions on asylum at the southern border to remove the humanitarian exemptions. They are planning to enter aggressive negotiations with Mexico to revive the Remain in Mexico policy, a person working on Trump’s transition said, and are identifying potential safe third countries where asylum seekers could be sent.
They also want to revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants who have either been granted a form of humanitarian protection known as temporary protected status—which covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans—or entered the country on a quasi-legal status called humanitarian parole. That population includes millions who have entered via government appointments at the southern border, as well as tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. following the Russian invasion.
Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), an anti-illegal-immigration hard-liner, said he thinks the Trump administration should disregard those deportation protections because, in his view, they were issued illegally.
“I believe we need to push the boundaries and claim they’ve got no status,” he said.
Here, I haven’t the foggiest what the courts will do. The overwhelming number of those claiming asylum are gaming the system, as they rather clearly don’t qualify for the exceedingly narrow provisions of the applicable law. But there is, in fact, applicable law—including international treaties ratified by the Senate—that would seem to require at least some modicum of due process to ensure that we don’t deport legitimate claimants. That the system is being gamed is extremely frustrating, but I don’t see how we can simply ignore the law.
Rather than forcibly deporting all migrants, Trump’s advisers hope they can induce some to leave voluntarily, according to people familiar with the matter. They have discussed offering immigrants in the country illegally—or those who entered on parole through Biden administration programs—a chance to leave the country without penalties, so they can return on a visa if they are eligible. Under normal circumstances, when someone is deported, they are barred from returning on a visa for 10 years.
This seems like a no-brainer. But it would also be logistically challenging. Assuming these folks believed the promise rather than assuming it was a trick to get them to turn themselves in, there would still be a processing requirement.
Republican lawmakers, buoyed by their election gains, are planning to use a process called reconciliation to advance legislation that funds Trump’s immigration proposals alongside his energy and tax priorities. Under the arcane rules of reconciliation, legislation can be approved with a simple majority vote, rather than the 60 votes usually required to advance most bills in the Senate, as long as the changes made are primarily budgetary rather than policy shifts.
Republicans have already taken back control of the Senate, and they are poised to keep control of the House. With majorities in both chambers, they could move the reconciliation measure without support from Democrats.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.) said in a letter circulated to Republican lawmakers this week that reconciliation legislation would “surge resources to the southern border to build the Trump Border Wall, acquire new detection technologies, bolster our Border Patrol, and stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Given the centrality of this issue to the Republican campaign strategy, I take it as a given that this will pass in some form—likely with a modicum of Democratic support.
To avoid adding to the federal deficit, some members of Congress have also floated tacking new fees onto different steps of the immigration process, such as applying for asylum or even appearing in immigration court, that would help pay for deportations. The U.S. immigration system is already largely funded by fees for citizenship and visa applications, though humanitarian programs—and court proceedings—are free.
This strikes me as fantasy, akin to Mexico paying for the wall. Even if it were legal to charge asylum-seekers a fee, most of these people have little or no money. That’s why they’re here.
Trump struggled during his first term to deport large numbers of migrants, particularly those living in blue states that cut off cooperation with the federal government. In addition to a huge infusion of cash, mass deportations would require unprecedented coordination among federal, state and local officials.
This is unlikely to change in the second term.
Reuters (“Inside Trump’s plan for mass deportations – and who wants to stop him“) adds:
While the incoming Trump administration could benefit from experience gained during his first term, it could again encounter resistance from ideologically opposed government employees, including officers that screen migrants for asylum.
The American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups have been preparing for court battles if Trump again tests the bounds of his legal authority.
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who led the fight against Trump’s contentious family separation policy, said more than 15 lawyers focused on immigration with the organization’s national office spent the year readying for the possibility of a Trump return.
“We definitely need to be coordinated and have more resources, because I think they will come in much more prepared,” Gelernt said.
The State Department in particular could be one place where Trump acts more aggressively than during his first term, several Trump backers said.
A key factor will be whether other countries will accept their citizens, an issue Trump faced with limited success during his first term. The Trump administration also struggled at times to convince other nations in the region – including Mexico – to take steps to stop migrants from moving toward the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Trump, said the State Department was a “roadblock” for immigration enforcement and that aggressive appointees will be key.
Christopher Landau, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2019-2021, recently said he was frustrated with the reluctance of some U.S. diplomats to tackle immigration enforcement.
“Nobody really thought that was their problem,” Landau said in an October panel discussion by the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restricting immigration.
Even if the Supreme Court ultimately goes along, we’re likely to see legal challenges gum up the works for much of the next two years, at which point Trump is likely—just based on historical trends—to have a less friendly Congress. And, yes, one expects substantial resistance from some parts of the federal bureaucracy.
Trump has vowed to bring back his “Schedule F” plan to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants into political appointees. It’s almost certainly not legal. Congress could go along but, presumably, Senate Democrats would staunchly oppose doing so. It would likely require ending the filibuster to make it happen.
I think you mean “allowing the President to arrogate to himself.”
I also anticipate this aggressive enforcement response to negatively impact the economy enough to draw questions about its continuation.
How about “messy”?
A suggestion: it might be a good idea to do a post summarizing the experience of the Japanese-Americans in WWII. Include the info about how their property was appropriated by people who never had to give it back or pay restitution when the Japanese-Americans were eventually freed.
There will be a lot more of this. Military voters may love Trump, but he despises them.
That at least makes sense. Not likel to work, but is not insane.
People who’ve made the trip through the Darién always have paid up Amex cards.
I take it as a given that Trump’s court will obey him. And if they don’t, he’ll ignore them.
Also, a given.
I believe there is a fallacy as to how the courts, congress or the bureaucracy will impede trump, they won’t. The difference between trump admin 2017 and 2025 is not competency of the team, its the dedication of the team to achieving trump’s whims. There are no longer normies that are dedicated to the rule of law and seeing the process carried out and willing to throw up roadblocks along the way. Admin 2025 are true believers in his dictatorship and will due what he believes in necessary to carry out his orders.
He won’t obey court orders and will steamroll the congress. Lot’s of awful things didn’t happen during admin 1 because of his short attention span and the willingness of his lieutenants to let controversial orders drop, now the true believers are the lieutenants.
@Joe: Fixed.
@Michael Reynolds: @Sleeping Dog: Trump may well do an Andrew Jackson and ignore the Supreme Court. Maybe the Border Patrol would, too. The military and other federal agencies won’t.
Or Trump could deputize the Proud Boys and announce they’re some kind of citizen militia with special responsibilities. All bets are off if that happens.
This strikes me as conditional to the degree that Trump can implement his Schedule F plan. I have doubts as to what degree he will succeed, but my natural skepticism inclines me to temper my doubts in this case. He may do better on this issue in the same way he dramatically outperformed on the popular vote. My inner skeptic is not a complete idiot.
@Sleeping Dog:
I think Congress and the courts are a lot more loyal to Leonard Leo, foundations like Heritage and big donors than to Trump. Yes, they do fear stochastic violence inspired by Trump, but Trump loyalty mostly derives from Trump being an agent of Leonard Leo etc. – plus, of course Trumps MAGA voters.
Courts and Congress will not necessarily buck Leo, Thiel etc. to side with Trump.
ETA: And, Trump is lazy, stupid and developing physical and mental symptoms, will become increasingly low energy, a lame duck also.
@James: I hope you are correct. I am increasingly less sanguine about legality stopping Trump.
The basic foundations of your argument above should have, for example, led to a fairly swift prosecution of the classified documents case. And yet, not only was it gummed up, it was eventually dismissed.
I recognize that we are talking about different types of actions, but my trust that the courts will save us has dwindled considerably.
Your faith in the Supreme Court as an institution is touching.
Somebody help me out. There’s a running gag about a German word for taking pleasure in the suffering of others. What was the German word for the process of the Nazi Party taking over the government bureaucracy?
I guess I’ll have to re-up membership in the Japanese American Citizen League…
@Steven L. Taylor:
Merrick Garland could not seem to comprehend the damage done to the system of checks & balances and respond with the necessary urgency. He did not rise to the needs of the work, favoring bureaucracy over leadership. Afraid of appearing partisan, he dawdled and leaned too far in the other direction.
Probably a nice guy but ultimately a featherweight trying to complete in a heavyweight match.
Don’t be a Merrick Garland, @James Joyner. Most abscesses do not reveal their depth and decay from the surface.
@James Joyner:
@just nutha:
From your lips to the deity of your choice’s ears.
@Steven L. Taylor:
My trust has gone back to bed and pulled the blankets over it’s head.
I think it’s pretty clear what Trump will do. He will get enough ICE people together to very publicly round up and deport some groups totaling the hundreds from places like NYC, LA and Chicago. It will demonstrate he is deporting people and that liberals are hiding illegals. What he wont do is deport illegals from red states where they are easy to find and help keep their economies running.
Steve
Maybe they can set up a GoFundMe to pay for all the deportations.
Also, Eileen Cannon is the future of the courts. Loyalty over the law.
I’ve heard it said there are one million persons that have a current deportation orders. Provided they have no further due process appeals, I have no problem with “rounding” these individuals up. That first priority should keep ICE and law enforcement busy for a while.
What I fear may actually happen is that the deportation squad will go after the “low-hanging fruit” and not spend the time and effort to go after the really serious problems.
@Bobert:
Let’s take that million. They come from Mexico, Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, China, and a dozen other countries. How do we sort them for deportation? Are we sending Haitians to Mexico? Chinese to Jamaica?
Are we at all sure these countries will accept our deportees? Is Venezuela going to play ball? China? Even Mexico? Are we proposing to seize border crossings and airports with special forces in anticipation of incoming deportees?
Illinois has ~400,000 undocumented immigrants. Let’s say we’re going for just half, and let’s pretend they’re all from Mexico and Mexico is happy to have them back. It’s a 1500 mile trip to the nearest Mexican border. So probably 30 hours on a bus. Bathrooms? I’ve ridden the Dog, that little toilet has to be emptied. And the bus needs fuel. And the people need to be fed.
Let’s assume we cram 60 at a time onto a Greyhound. So 200,000 people means 3400 buses. For the full million we’re talking 16,700 buses. That’s a lot of buses taking a lot of trips.
Now, how about security? Because we’re told there are tons of murderers among these people. You’re putting children on a bus with a killer? Or ar you trusting the middle-aged bus driver to maintain control? Even if there aren’t any criminals? Do you remember your school bus days?
Now, flights, that’s even tougher. Are we flying people to China? The Philippines? Haiti? @Kathy could do the math.
At a bare minimum we are talking thousand of flights, tens of thousand of bus trips (don’t forget, you have to get those pesky illegals in New Jersey to the border before you can push them over the border. There’s baggage. Food. Medical care. Security. There’s the massive force required to find and arrest. The huge detention and sorting camps, all with their own multitude of issues. Just how many hundreds of billions of dollars are we prepared to spend just to jack up the price of fruit?
@Michael Reynolds:
All very valid points, glad that you addressed the expense and difficulty.
My understanding is that Cuba and Venezuela will NOT accept deportees, but why anyone imagine that Mexico would accept non-Mexicans?
In short very messy and very expensive. So sets up the question, with the exception of actual criminals, is it worth expending American treasure?
IMO, it is not
@James Joyner:
@James, I hope you are right, but after watching the guardrails collapse one after another during the trump years, I’m not sure. Nixon fired Cox and Richardson, but then found Bork to protect him, it isn’t difficult to see trump picking off general after admiral till he finds a compliant officer.
These articles have been referenced here before but are still fresh and germane to the subject:
The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border
How Trump’s Anti-Immigration Plans Could Take Center Stage in Texas
@Michael Reynolds:
I heard this guy went out of business down there a long time ago.
Speaking as a very troglodyte-ish Flat Earth Luddite, the solution seems obvious but unrealistic, and absolutely unenforceable.
Instead of targeting the illegal immigrants, the businesses employing the illegal immigrants must be the target. You have 20 (or 200, or 20,000) illegal immigrants working in your chicken processing plant? Then you are paying a fine and you, personally , Mr. Corporate, are going to prison. The immigrants get sent back to the border with our apologies for their misuse and a check for shipping and handling. You, the employer ultimately responsible for this, are the one who gets to do time with Bruno and the rest of the guys I know from those days.
But then, I am but a simple retired Luddite, and obviously have no understanding that the world is meant to be solely for the benefit of the uberclass and our corporate masters.
I expect Trump to continue what Biden’s been doing. The difference will be that Biden was kind of embarrassed about it and kept it more or less hushed up, and the media for whatever reason didn’t blow the whistle. Trump will shriek the news to the heavens and the media will dutifully run headline stories about the tens of thousands of vicious criminals the new administration is removing from the country.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Already tried. That didn’t work either.
The end result of deporting a million or more undocs? Labor costs go up, picked fruit is scarce, construction slows as labor evaporates, and we have fewer people paying into social security, and no one to wipe the ass of the 85 year-old spending that SS.
The idea that American citizens are going to take over the carving of chickens, and the cleaning of hotel rooms, and the care and feeding of Alzheimers patients, and the picking of strawberries is ludicrous. Have these people met any actual Americans? Walk down a busy street and point out the guys you think want to lose fingers, standing in blood for hours, cutting up beef. A patron – a citizen or green card holder – brings illegals, often relations, onto the job, trains them up for it. Imagining that everything will be fine is to fail to grasp that this is skilled work. No one would suggest replacing coal miners with people whose job experience is driving an Uber.
The reputed price tag is 88 billion. With a ‘B.’ Every year. Gee, it sounds like such a good idea. One thing: why are we doing this?
@DeD:
This has been proposed since USA closed the braceros program. They keep threatening it’ll happen, but I haven’t seen it enforced (in more than lip service) in my lifetime. If you can provide references to when the United States actually did this on a widespread basis, I’d love to be proven wrong.
@Michael Reynolds:
Why are we doing this?
My simplistic answer is xenophobia.
How did we come to this?
Xenophobic leaders convinced voters that swimming across the river was the worst crime ever, those who would commit such a heinous act would have no hesitation in engaging in wonton murder, rape, and mail fraud.
@Steven L. Taylor: “The basic foundations of your argument above should have, for example, led to a fairly swift prosecution of the classified documents case. And yet, not only was it gummed up, it was eventually dismissed.”
Adding on for James:
James, the SCOTUS Six looked at Trump trying to overthrow the government, and awarded him vastly increase power and immunity.