Trump’s mass deportation project — easier said than done

In speech after speech during his long campaign to win a second term in the White House, Donald Trump railed against foreigners living in the country without authorisation and warned that uncontrolled immigration was “poisoning the blood of our country” and must be stopped.

After his stunning victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump is set to move back into the White House on 20 January 2025, time to show that he is a man of his words. “On day one, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history,” he often told his rallies, to thunderous applause.

At the Republican Party’s National Convention in July, delegates waved a sea of large posters saying MASS DEPORTATION NOW, a reflection of widespread anti-immigrant feeling in a party whose leader, Donald Trump, has described illegal  immigrants as “vermin.”  

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The election results showed that anti-immigrant sentiment is widespread and not restricted to Republicans.

Trump, who made immigration the key issue of his campaign, became the first Republican in two decades to win both the popular vote—just under 75 million—and the Electoral Council, which, in America’s antiquated electoral system, decides the winner.

What happens on Day One of the mass deportation pledge? Trump is expected to sign a string of executive orders to roll back legal entry programmes designed by President Joe Biden, make it easier to arrest immigrants with no criminal records, move troops to the southern border and renew construction of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Trump already has named a “border czar,” Tom Homan, who was acting chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for two years in Trump’s first term before retiring. He will be backed by Stephen Milller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration measures, who has been named White House deputy chief of staff.   

Regarded as a white nationalist by critics from the left and moderate Republicans, Miller is driven by the idea that “America is for America and Americans only,” as he put it at Trump’s last rally before the elections at New York City’s Madison Square Gardens.

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Trump, now president-elect, has given few details on exactly what he plans for the biggest mass deportation in American history. But Miller and “Americans only” radicals have painted a picture of what they have in mind for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country.

There will be raids on workplaces across the country and those caught in dragnets will be taken to what Miller has described as “large staging grounds” where they will await removal to their countries of origin.  

According to Homan, in a television interview, the priority will be on “public-safety threats and national security threats…targeted arrests and worksite enforcement operations.” He dismissed fears of mass sweeps of neighbourhoods. 

Trump has never put a figure on his deportation project and sidestepped questions on how to handle cases involving “mixed-status families” of undocumented immigrants with children or siblings who are US citizens by virtue of having been born in the country.

Birthright citizenship is anchored in the US Constitution. Anti-immigration radicals complained about “anchor babies” in Trump’s first term, and there has been right-wing debate about the feasibility of ending birthright citizenship.

It would require a constitutional amendment and the chances of that are zero even though Republicans now control all three pillars of the government – the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.  

While the United States is host to more immigrants than any other country, how to handle the influx of newcomers has been subject to debate for decades. In theory, it should not be difficult to find a solution. There has long been agreement among politicians of all stripes on one issue -- the country’s immigration system is broken. It is a case of extremely rare unanimity in a deeply divided country.

The closest America’s dysfunctional government came to fix a key part of the problem – the porous border with Mexico – came in April when weeks of negotiations by senators led by a staunch Republican, James Lankford from the state of Oklahoma, agreed on a b-partisan bill that would have provided some of the biggest changes in immigration law in decades.

Bowing to pressure from Trump, who wanted to use a crisis at the border as a campaign issue to paint Democrats as weak on border security, Republican senators killed the bill.  

Trump then stepped up anti-immigrant rhetoric in a way that created the impression that all undocumented immigrants were criminals, from rapists and murderers to people who, in the city of Springfield, Ohio, stole and ate the dogs and cats of the people who lived there.

The figure most often touted for the number of deportations planned is one million per year for the first year, with more to come later. In theory, it looks difficult but achievable. In practice, “it’s a campaign fever dream,” said Roberto Suro, an immigration expert and professor at the University of Southern California School of Public Policy. Why?

The legal obstacles for removals of that magnitude at a relatively fast pace are formidable. So are the logistics.

Undocumented immigrants caught in the planned dragnet have the right to due process, including a court hearing before their removal. Under the system now in place, the decision on deportation is left to an immigration judge.

According to the Department of Justice, there are now only 700 judges dealing with a backlog of 3.7 million cases. That works out at 5,300 cases per judge. The Congressional Research Service has estimated it would take about 1,000 additional judges to tackle the current backlog by 2032.

In other words, for Trump to fulfil his promise his administration would have to engineer a gigantic expansion of the immigration court system. How he would raise a large army of new judges has yet to be explained.

Finding and tracking down undocumented immigrants, including through large-scale worksite raids, would be the job of ICE agents.  

Their number, now around 20,000, would have to be vastly increased, perhaps doubled or tripled. Recruiting that many agents in time for Trump to take office is as unlikely as raising a sizeable army of immigration judges.  

These are just two of the obstacles experts cite as reasons for scepticism over the prospect of major action early in Trump’s new term. Day One is more likely to feature images of Trump holding aloft a signed executive order than unauthorised immigrants herded into buses.

No matter how the Greatest Mass Deportation in American history evolves later in the new administration, it is a safe bet that it will be far from the spirit of the famous 1883 poem engraved at the bottom of New York’s Statue of Liberty.

The poem’s most memorable lines:  

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me”