Donald Trump is pledging to make good on his promise to crack down on immigrants when he took office—no matter the cost. “There is no price list,” he said speak NBC News on Thursday, said he had “no choice” but to carry out his plan to carry out what he described as “the largest deportation effort in United States history.”
“Clearly we must make our borders strong and powerful,” the president-elect said.
As in his first successful run for the White House, Trump has made immigration a key issue in his 2024 campaign. He and the Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has proposed ending birthright citizenship, removing Haitians legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status and reinstating travel bans, among other plans. And while Trump suggested to NBC News that “we want people to come into our country legally,” he also proposed restricting legal immigration.
But the centerpiece of his anti-immigration agenda — “building the wall” this cycle — is mass deportations: “We have become a dumping ground for the world,” Trump said in his speech. me. dark address at the Republican National Convention this summer. “They won’t get away with this for long,” Trump told his supporters, vowing a deportation campaign “even greater” than Trump’s brutal “Operation Wetback” program. Dwight Eisenhower in the 50s.
The logistics of Trump’s plan remain unclear: As of 2022, there will be about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security. estimate. During Trump’s first term, as CNN anchor Catherine E. Shoichet noted Thursday, his administration carried out 1.5 million deportations, at a cost of nearly $11,000 each. Vance said in August that he wants to deport a million undocumented immigrants a year, just as a “start”: “Then we can go from there,” he said. speak ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.
How could a second Trump administration scale up its deportation campaign to that extent? Vance offers a “sequential approach”; anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller Have propose The military will be involved; and Trump himself has propose invoked the two-century-old Alien Enemies Act, which the U.S. government previously used to detain citizens of German, Italian and Japanese descent during World War II. But details, as is often the case with Trump, are scant.
That doesn’t mean he won’t move forward. While Trump’s stupidity and laziness sometimes derailed the evil ambitions of his first term, haphazard implementation often made bad policy even worse — especially is when it comes to immigration measures like his family separation program, the program Its brutality was exacerbated by the chaos in its implementation. The complex logistical challenges of Trump’s anti-immigrant fantasies may not be an obstacle in the way of realizing them, as some have suggested. propose; instead, they can ensure that their implementation is even more reckless.
