Taking Trump's mass deportation vow seriously and literally
His signature campaign promise is to brutalize people on an unprecedented scale.
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Donald Trump has repeatedly promised that if he returns to the White House, he will deport every undocumented person in the US. Most experts say that would be 11 million people, but Trump has insisted that the number is closed to 18 million or even 30 million.
Trump’s provided few details about how he would go about accomplishing such a massive forced relocation program, though he’s suggested he would deputize local police, call in the National Guard, and perhaps use the military. He’s also said, with some relish, that “getting them out will be a bloody story.”
This past weekend, Trump turned his violent and dehumanizing rhetoric up to 11, proclaiming during an event in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, that migrants “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
“These people are animals,” Trump said, vowing that "I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. We're going to liberate our country."
This Trumpian dystopia bears no resemblance to reality. Trump went as far as to claim that “hundreds of little cities and little towns" in the Midwest are being "occupied" by migrants with "MK-47s." (Watch below.)
As untethered from reality as he is, Trump is deadly serious about attempting deportation on an unprecedented scale. Even making an attempt to round up that many people would lead to horrific suffering and the weaponizing of state terror against immigrants, Latinos, Black people, and Trump’s partisan enemies.
In short, Trump is calling for a massive military operation that seems designed to lead to economic misery, concentration camps, and mass death.
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Mass deportation would be massively expensive
Experts are skeptical that Trump could enact his terrifying deportation agenda in part because to do so would require vast amounts of money. The funds would have to come from Congress, and even far right legislators are likely to balk at the cost.
In 2023, ICE deported 142,580 people with a budget of $420 million. Trump wants to deport at minimum 10 million individuals; proportionally, that would cost about $30 billion.
There would be huge additional costs as well. ICE currently spends some $2.4 billion a year on 41,500 detainee beds. Trump is calling for more than 10 times as much deportation; the cost for warehousing immigrants could also be tens of billions of dollars.
Even that’s only scratching the surface of the cost. Immigrants contribute to the economy by paying taxes, performing needed jobs, and providing income for households that include US citizens.
Undocumented people paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022; that’s all money that would be lost if Trump got his wish. In addition, the Center for Migration studies estimates that if a third of US citizen children of undocumented immigrants remain in the US after their parents are deported, the state would end up spending $118 billion to care for them. GDP could contract 1.4 percent in the first year. Losses could total $4.7 trillion over a decade.
As the Washington Monthly argues, deporting 11 million immigrants would cause a national labor contraction and recession; there could be 968,000 job losses for American citizens. National wage and salary income could fall by $317.2 billion. Total deportation costs could be $265 billion.
In short, it’s impossible to fully anticipate or predict the cost of such a huge, wasteful, ill-considered program. But Trump’s deportation nightmare is likely to make the country poorer by trillions of dollars. Recession, contraction, and economic misery will afflict the US for years, and possibly decades.
The economic implications are horrible. But they aren’t the worst part.
Mass deportation will lead to mass human rights abuses
Analysts have struggled to quantify and describe the human rights implications of Trump’s deportation strategy. A militarized force going door to door throughout the country with sweeping powers to arrest anyone they deem suspicious is obviously going to lead to monstrous abuses.
Trump has also said that he would be open to creating mass concentration camps at the border to warehouse undocumented people. He’s claimed these camps would be temporary since he plans to deport people quickly — but it’s easy to imagine hundreds of thousands of people housed in “temporary” facilities without adequate food or water, subject to rampant disease and violence from guards.
There are at least some historical blueprints that can give us a sense of how dangerous and vicious a mass deportation program could be.
Trump has repeatedly touted the Eisenhower-era Operation Wetback, named for a racist slur, as an inspiration for his policy. The operation was conducted by a task force of around 800 agents, who set up roadblocks and raided homes and workplaces in 1954 and 1955.
Eisenhower’s deportation program ejected between 300,000 and 1.3 million people in 1954-1955. The Mexican government helped, in hopes that returned migrants would help with the country’s labor shortage.
Even so, the operation, was, not surprisingly, a humanitarian nightmare. Immigrants were jammed into cargo ships traveling from Texas to Veracruz, with conditions congressional investigators compared to an “eighteenth-century slave ship.” Many were simply dumped in the desert; in one incident 88 people died of heatstroke. Historians believe that US citizens were swept up in the stings and deported, but no one is sure of how many.
Another incident with some parallels to Trump’s proposed program is the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916. The Turkish ethnic cleansing of Armenians began with large scale murders by army troops. But it progressed to a system of mass deportation of the 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. All together, probably a million Armenians died during the deportation, either murdered outright or succumbing to starvation and exposure.
Finally, we can get some sense of what Trump policy in a second term would be like by looking at Trump policy in his first term. Trump created concentration camps at the southern border, and separated some 5,000 children from their families. No records were kept, so restoring children to their parents was difficult and in many cases impossible.
More, reporting found that this was not an accidental error. The Trump administration separated children from parents as a punishment, hoping that by traumatizing families they would discourage other people from crossing the border.
Trump, then, sees cruelty, violence, and horror as a feature, not a bug, in deportation and immigration policy. He also makes little distinction between legal and undocumented people; he and his running mate JD Vance have been promising to deport Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, even though those immigrants are documented, legal, and employed. (As you can see in the clip below, Vance during a recent speech said “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien” of such legal migrants.)
In the past, Trump has even suggested that Democratic members of Congress like Ilhan Omar who oppose his agenda are not real Americans and that they should “go back where [they] came from.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are many more than 11 million undocumented people in the US; it seems likely he is exaggerating because he wants to deport lots of legal immigrants, as well as many Black and brown citizens.
A fascist atrocity
Eisenhower’s deportation program, and even the Armenian genocide, were much smaller in scale than Trump’s proposed operation. But both provide some dire warnings. Large scale forced deportations are chaotic and extremely violent. Once a group has been identified as a danger to the state, the state is going to target that group for cruelty and violence.
Mass deportations are not clean, careful administrative procedures. They are exercises in bigotry and atrocity. People caught up in them will face ugly conditions. They will die of exposure; they will die of starvation; they will die of disease. The Armenian genocide suggests that in some cases, security forces may simply shoot them and dump them in mass graves.
Even if Trump’s policy is only realized in part, it could result in large-scale brutality. A policy designed to demonize and target as many as 30 million people as enemies of the regime will likely result in many thousands of deaths.
Again, it’s hard to know what Trump’s deportation program will actually mean in practice. Critics are understandably cautious about its implications given the many unknowns. But it’s important to acknowledge that Trump is promising his followers something that looks an awful lot like a genocide. If he is elected, we should expect the worst — and the worst here includes an economic and human rights disaster on a scale which is difficult to imagine.
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Right now, when I hear that Trump has said, 50 mil and 80 mil will be deported and he is going to start on this right away, knowing that 1) it is the most important issue to many of the people that vote for him; and 2) knowing that once done, it will be really, really hard to undo. Basically Trump, like Reagan spent their administrations undoing the good that was done before them, that took maybe decades to bring about. They will end it with one fell swoop of expensive chaos, and murder, and then afterwards, there will not be the money to undo it. When I talk about project 2025, I say it will turn the USA into a third world country. I am wondering whether all of the journalists who have been sane washing his outrageous comments, and cleaning them up in summarization, have second homes in other countries, because doing this is not going to protect them from Trump's hatred of the media, unless they plan to capitulation into a docile member of a fascist Christian Nationalist Theocratic state he intends us to be, that will be much like Iran. As a reader of Project 2025 in a Democrats Abroad book club, I can see all the ways that they plan to destroy the USA and it makes me think of the fall of the Roman Empire. Our empire is going to be destroyed by these hateful, hate filled people who tie it to being Christian. So, at the same time one is for normal, bright, capable Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, one is against a Christian Nationalist Nation state.
Agree. All I can see in the future if trump is allowed power again is death and destruction. All of the ignorant (or just plain stupid) people who vote for this monster have no idea what they're really voting for. They apparently don't realize everything trump does will affect them as well as Democrats. I am still very hopeful that more of us are capable of seeing and hearing reality and will vote for Harris/Walz. Otherwise, those of us who aren't able to relocate anywhere else on earth will suffer. I could cry thinking about it. What a terrible moment in history these past eight years have been.