When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to build a wall to seal the border and prevent criminals from entering the country. This time, his campaign has a new goal: an unprecedented mass deportation program in the country.
His party’s platform, ratified at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, promises the “largest deportation effort in American history,” and immigration was the topic of Tuesday’s meeting.
What would it take to deport millions of people? Is this possible?
How many immigrants are in the country illegally?
There were 11 million immigrants living in the United States without legal permission in 2022, according to the latest government estimates, and more than 8 in 10 have been in the country for more than a decade. Trump said during last month’s debate that there were 18 million, which is unsubstantiated.
Fleeing political and economic turmoil, migrants from countries like Venezuela have crossed the border in record numbers under the Biden administration.
Who would be deported and how easy would it be to expel them?
Trump and the Republican platform have made very general statements, but have so far offered very few details regarding the operation they intend to carry out.
The former president has suggested that any immigrant lacking legal status might be expelled.
The party’s platform states that priority would be given to “the most dangerous criminals.”
It also says: “The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens home and deporting those who have broken our laws.”
The consensus among immigration experts and former national security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost hurdles would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Trump seeks within a four-year presidential term.
“Even if you had a Congress willing to enact sweeping legislative reforms and allocate the tens of billions needed, there is no way such a system might be fully operational within four years,” said John Sandweg, a national security official in the Obama administration.
What other obstacles would there be?
Immigrants who have been living in the country for years have legal protection and the right to a fair trial.
In recent years, those who have entered the country illegally have been processed at the border and then released with orders to appear in court for deportation hearings. While their cases are being processed in immigration court, which often takes several more years, they have the right to remain in the United States.
“Trump would have to triple the size of immigration courts to get anywhere near the numbers he’s talking regarding,” Sandweg said. “Even then, he would need funding to build new courthouses, hire support staff and train judges.”
Decades of underfunding and a high number of asylum applications have exacerbated the backlog.
“An individual must be ordered deported; a president might not simply ignore that,” said Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. “It would require a change in the law, and Congress would need to be an active partner in this.”
Are there sufficient personnel, facilities, aircraft and other means of transportation for a deportation operation?
During the Trump administration, there were some 936,000 deportations, according to official data. As of February, the Biden administration had expelled some 340,000 people.
To identify and detain millions of people in the country’s interior would require tens of thousands more immigration agents, Napolitano said.
Trump has said he would call on the National Guard and other military resources to carry out his plan.
Local law enforcement might be tasked with identifying people without legal status and turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has happened in the past in some localities.
But Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Philadelphia are just a few of the cities that refuse to cooperate with ICE, fearing that such cooperation would encourage racial profiling and land immigrants who have committed minor crimes, such as traffic violations, in deportation proceedings.
“There will be areas that want nothing to do with this,” said Michael Neifach, a border security expert who served as chief legal adviser to Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the George W. Bush administration.
Every potential deportee is held in a detention center, and in the current fiscal year, Congress funded the detention of 41,500 immigrants a day at a cost of $3.4 billion, a figure that would have to increase exponentially.
Where is there room for Trump to speed up the pace of expulsions?
A new Trump administration might accelerate deportations by ending programs introduced by the Biden administration.
For example, since 2022, regarding 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been allowed to fly to the United States and live and work for two years, provided they have a financial sponsor. Biden has also allowed nearly 700,000 migrants who make an appointment on a mobile app to cross the border at an official port of entry and receive work permits.
CONTENT FOR SUBSCRIBERS
“Trump might flip the switch and revoke it,” Neifach said. But, he added, many of the migrants might file asylum claims and end up filling the overcrowded courts.
Would there be any exceptions among those deported?
Trump has not addressed whether he would exercise any discretion or make any exceptions.
More than one million Americans are married to a person without legal status, and a large portion of immigrants have children who are U.S. citizens.
“When you talk regarding those kinds of numbers and law enforcement presence, you have to ultimately think: What does that do to the atmosphere of the country?” said Napolitano, a former Homeland Security secretary.
#deport #millions #immigrants #Republican #plan #explained
