The Republican nominee has pledged to expel tens of millions of immigrants if he wins in November. How would that work?
What does Trump want to do?
To conduct the “largest deportation program in American history,” according to the Donald Trump–approved 2024 Republican Party platform. Trump has pledged repeatedly on the campaign trail that if he regains the White House, the 20 million people he believes are in the U.S. illegally will be rounded up and expelled. The Department of Homeland Security estimates there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.; most have been here for an average of 16 years. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out “large-scale raids” in communities across the nation, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said, agents would be brought in from the FBI, ATF, DEA, and other federal agencies. Local police officers would be deputized to join the effort, as would National Guard soldiers offered by Republican-run states, along with other military assets. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, but Miller has said a future Trump administration would get around this by invoking the Insurrection Act. To skirt due process issues for noncitizens, Trump has talked of using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to allow the summary deportation of “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” All this is necessary, Trump says, to “stop the plunder, rape, slaughter, and destruction of our American suburbs, cities, and towns.”
Is this plan feasible?
Constitutional issues aside, the logistics of such a program would be daunting. In fiscal year 2023, ICE—which has 6,000 deportation officers—and Customs and Border Patrol deported about 450,000 people; many were recent border crossers. Raising that number to a million a year would require sweeping raids on neighborhoods and businesses and involve up to 150,000 deputized enforcement officers, said Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under President Biden. “You are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” he said. Those arrested would then need to be detained somewhere. The U.S. currently spends $3.4 billion a year on space and staff to hold 41,500 detainees, and that spend would rise exponentially. Miller has talked of using the military to build “vast holding facilities” in Texas. But “if you throw together a bunch of tents in the border and shove 50,000 people in them,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, “people are going to die.” A backlog of immigration cases in the courts means many detainees could be stuck in those camps for years.
How big is the legal backlog?
Some 3.3 million people are waiting to have their cases heard by an immigration judge. Since 2021, the U.S. has added 300 new judges, for a total of 734. But even if that number were to double, it would still take more than eight years for courts to clear the backlog, according to the Congressional Research Service. When a deportation is approved, that person must then be physically removed from the U.S. Some countries, such as Venezuela, do not accept deportations of their own nationals, and others, like Brazil, throw up bureaucratic hurdles that prevent their nationals from being deported in large numbers. Transportation is also a challenge, because ICE has a limited number of passenger flight contractors; nearly every plane it sent off last year was full. Miller has suggested using military flights, but Pentagon officials have warned that would jeopardize troop readiness. “It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people,” said Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. Trump’s plan would cost “billions of dollars. It would probably take 20 years. It would cause the economy to shrink.”
How would it hurt the economy?
Undocumented immigrants constitute 5 percent of the workforce, so mass deportations would wreak havoc on the sectors where they are concentrated, such as agriculture, construction, hospitality, and health care. Removing all 11 million undocumented immigrants would shrink the labor force by 6.4 percent over two decades, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $1.6 trillion. For some Trump allies, that turmoil would be a positive. “Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” Miller said, “who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
What about the social impact?
An estimated 1 in 25 households in the U.S. include undocumented immigrants, so millions of families could be torn apart during such a crackdown. More than 3.4 million undocumented immigrants in the country have U.S.-born children under age 18. If they are arrested, they will have to choose between leaving their kids in America or being deported with them. With undertrained personnel carrying out immigration raids, it’s likely that racial profiling will occur and that many “U.S. citizens who are not required to carry documents” will be detained, said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Mass protests are possible, as are standoffs between states and federal authorities. If the National Guard from a GOP-led state is deployed to a Democratic-led state that refuses to cooperate with the roundup, would that state’s Democratic governor order his National Guard to bar their entry? “It’s going to be a mess,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, “and it’s going to be a nightmare.”
