Can Trump deport a million immigrants if elected?

If re-elected as president, Donald Trump has vowed to carry out the mass deport of individuals without legal permission to reside in the United States. Although his campaign has offered various estimates of how many could be deported, his vice-presidential nominee JD Vance suggested a specific figure during an interview with ABC News this week. “Let’s start with one million,” he declared. “That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”

While this has become a central pillar of the Trump platform, with rally signs declaring “Mass Deportations Now!”, experts note there are significant legal and practical hurdles to expelling such a large number of people. Advocates for immigrants caution that the human toll of mass deportations would be substantial, resulting in families being separated and raids occurring in communities and workplaces throughout the country.

According to the latest data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Research Center, there are roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, a figure that has stayed relatively steady since 2005. Most of these individuals are long-term residents, with nearly 80% having been in the country for more than a decade.

Undocumented immigrants are entitled to due process, which includes a court hearing before their removal. Implementing a significant increase in deportations would likely require a large expansion of the immigration court system, which is already facing significant backlogs. Most undocumented immigrants enter the deportation system through interactions with local law enforcement rather than direct encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

However, many of the nation’s largest cities and counties have passed laws limiting local police cooperation with ICE. The Trump campaign has promised to take action against these “sanctuary cities,” but the complex interplay of local, state, and federal laws complicates the situation.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI), stated that cooperation between ICE and local authorities would be a “critical” aspect of any mass deportation program. “It’s much easier for ICE to pick someone up from a jail if local law enforcement cooperates, instead of having to go look for them,” she explained.

As an example, Ms. Bush-Joseph referred to an early August announcement from the sheriff’s offices in Broward and Palm Beach counties, Florida, where they declared they would not deploy deputies to assist with any mass deportation plan. “There are many others who would not cooperate with a Trump mass deportation plan,” she noted. “That makes it so much harder.”

Any mass deportation effort would likely face immediate legal challenges from immigration and human rights activists. A 2022 Supreme Court decision, however, prevents courts from issuing injunctions against immigration enforcement policies, meaning these policies could proceed while legal challenges are ongoing.

If a U.S. administration were able to legally proceed with mass deportations, authorities would still face enormous logistical challenges. Under the Biden administration, deportation efforts have focused on migrants recently detained at the border. Migrants deported from within the U.S., particularly those not near the border, are typically individuals with criminal records or considered national security threats. Controversial workplace raids from the Trump administration were halted in 2021.

Interior deportations, or those of individuals arrested within the U.S. rather than at the border, have remained below 100,000 for a decade, peaking at over 230,000 during the early years of the Obama administration. “To increase that number to a million in a single year would require a massive infusion of resources that likely don’t exist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the media.

Experts doubt that ICE’s 20,000 agents and support staff would suffice to locate and apprehend even a small portion of the numbers suggested by the Trump campaign. Mr. Reichlin-Melnick added that the deportation process is lengthy and complex, starting with the identification and arrest of an undocumented immigrant. After that, detainees must be housed or placed in an “alternative to detention” program before appearing before an immigration judge, in a system already burdened by a years-long backlog.

Only after these steps are completed can detainees be removed from the U.S., a process that requires diplomatic cooperation from the receiving country. “In each of those areas, ICE simply does not have the capacity to process millions of people,” Mr. Reichlin-Melnick emphasized.

Trump has indicated he would consider involving the National Guard or other U.S. military forces to assist with deportations. Historically, the military’s role in immigration matters has been limited to support functions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Apart from potentially utilizing the military and “working with local law enforcement,” Trump has not provided detailed plans on how such a mass deportation program could be executed.

In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, the former president mentioned he would “not rule out” constructing new migrant detention facilities and would seek to grant police immunity from prosecution by “liberal or progressive groups.” He also suggested there might be incentives for state and local police departments to participate, and that those who choose not to “won’t partake in the riches.” “We have to do this,” he stated. “This is not a sustainable problem for our country.”

The media has reached out to the Trump campaign for further comments.

Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organization advocating for stricter immigration controls, remarked that any interior deportation program would only be effective if coupled with increased border enforcement. “That has to be the priority. You’re going to make very little progress in the interior if that’s not the case,” he noted. “That’s what keeps people showing up.”

Additionally, Mr. Ruark suggested that a crackdown on companies hiring undocumented migrants would be necessary. “They’re coming for jobs,” he explained. “And they’re getting those jobs because interior enforcement has basically been dismantled.”

Experts estimate that the total cost for deporting one million or more individuals could reach into the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. ICE’s budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420 million. In that year, the agency deported slightly over 140,000 people.

Thousands of immigrants would need to be detained while awaiting court hearings or deportation, and the Trump campaign envisions constructing large encampments to house them. The number of removal flights would also need to increase significantly, potentially requiring military aircraft to supplement current capacity. Even a small expansion in these areas could result in substantial costs. “Even a minor change is in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions,” Mr. Reichlin-Melnick explained. “A significant change is in the tens or hundreds of millions.”

These costs would add to the expenses of other border enforcement efforts that Trump has promised, such as continuing work on a southern U.S. border wall, implementing a naval blockade to stop fentanyl from entering the country, and deploying thousands of troops to the border.

Adam Isacson, a migration and border expert from the Washington Office on Latin America, suggested that “nightmarish images” of mass deportations could also hurt a potential Trump administration politically from a public relations perspective. “Every community in the U.S. would see people they know and love put on buses,” Mr. Isacson said. “You’d have some very painful images on TV of crying children and families,” he added. “All of that is incredibly bad press. It’s family separation, but on steroids.”

During the four years of the previous Trump administration, about 1.5 million people were deported, from both the border and the U.S. interior. The Biden administration, which has deported approximately 1.1 million people up to February 2024, is on track to match that number, according to statistics. Under the two terms of the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden was vice-president, over three million people were deported, earning Barack Obama the moniker “deporter-in-chief” from some immigration reform advocates.

The only historical comparison to a mass deportation program came in 1954, when up to 1.3 million people were deported as part of Operation Wetback, a term that used a derogatory slur commonly used against Mexican individuals at the time. That number is disputed by historians, however. The program, under President Dwight Eisenhower, faced considerable public opposition, partly because some U.S. citizens were also deported, as well as a lack of funding. It was largely discontinued by 1955.

Immigration experts assert that the focus on Mexican nationals and lack of due process in the earlier operation makes it incomparable to a modern-day mass deportation program. “Those [deported in the 1950s] were single, Mexican men,” said MPI’s Kathleen Bush-Joseph. “Now, the vast majority of people coming between ports of entry are from places that are not Mexico or even northern Central America. It makes it so much harder to return them,” she added. “Those are not comparable situations.”

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