There has always been a wide gap between Donald Trump’s rhetorical promises and their real-world consequences. But that gap is rapidly widening and becoming increasingly dangerous.
With the election less than a month out, it is now more crucial than ever to look closely at how Trump’s plans might play out, especially on the question of mass deportation.
No issue is more closely aligned with Trump than immigration, a topic about which the former president — along with his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and their MAGA allies — has been more than happy to spew increasingly hateful and dishonest rhetoric.
Early in Trump’s current presidential campaign, former advisor Stephen Miller, a likely key actor in a potential second Trump administration, made it clear the plan was to be extreme.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error,” he said. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”
What Miller et. all conveniently leave out is the cost to taxpayers, estimated to be around $968 billion even if, as they allege, more than 2 million undocumented immigrants “self-deport.”
Then there is the actual timeline. Not unlike Trump’s magical thinking about ending Russian aggression in Ukraine with a single phone call to Putin, the rhetoric assumes mass deportation can happen almost instantaneously.
In fact, an in-depth analysis reveals it would take at least a decade — assuming that the government could manage to detain and deport more than 1 million immigrants a year (there are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country). Moreover, Department of Homeland Security detention capacity would need to be expanded up to 24 times its current capacity with more than 30,000 new ICE hires.
The cost of this investment in vengeful racism would be about the same as building 2.9 million new homes for low-income families, four times the entire National Institutes for Health budget over the decade, and three times the cost of free school meals for children.
It is a reminder that the Trumpian vision of “making America great again” is to siphon taxpayer funding for quixotic and overtly xenophobic initiatives while sidestepping the real-world practical challenges of implementing sound economic and social policy.
The authoritarian playbook
Unfortunately, the high cost of mass deportation would not deter a Trump administration committed to centralized authoritarian governance — because their view is that dismantling current laws and regulations in the immigration system is not only desirable policy reform but, also, quite expedient.
One of the most worrisome problems then is that the most attractive way to cheaply conduct mass deportation would be to ignore the provisions of current immigration law, bypass the entire court system, and “just do it,” by illegally relying on the military.
Undergirding this approach is the premise that all undocumented immigrants are criminals and liabilities, making it likely the Trump administration would move rapidly to abandon principles of prosecutorial discretion that currently focus deportation efforts toward detaining genuinely dangerous criminals.
Instead, deportation efforts would be expanded so widely that they would become less effective in targeting criminals and more likely to detain longtime law-abiding immigrants — such as DACA recipients and other longtime community members.
This is no mere speculation. A distinguished immigration law expert has documented an early harbinger of this effort during Trump’s prior administration.
A reign of fear would almost certainly ensue, as random sweeps target neighborhoods and communities with concentrations of individuals perceived as enemies of the government, i.e. Trump and MAGA-linked local and state officials.
My own review of published data on the numbers of households threatened by Trump and his allies’ plans for massive deportation suggests that about 25 million people would be affected, including 5 million non-citizens who are lawfully present in the U.S. (e.g. DACA recipients, backlogged applicants for U visas, T, SIJ visas), as well as 7 million or so of their family members, including legal permanent residents and US citizen relatives.
A crippling economic blow
Should the presidency return to Trump, his effort to carry out the deportation agenda would have devastating impacts on both large and small businesses across the U.S., with states such as California — home to the highest immigrant population in the country — being hardest hit.
Disruption of labor supply would not only hurt agriculture, construction, and the hospitality industry, but also lead to a loss of long-term immigrants working in mid-level supervisory, managerial, and research positions in universities, K-12 schools, health care providers, retail, manufacturing, and local government services.
The ripple effects from local labor shortages would result in increased cost for consumers, disruptions in supply chains, and decreased tax revenue for federal, state, and local government.
It is estimated that, if successful, mass deportation would decrease GDP by 4.2%-6.8% and lower tax revenue by more than $100 million per year.
The end of democracy
Trump supporters often insist his vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric is “just talk,” contending that his leadership is great “because he gets things done.” Neither presumption is well-founded.
Trump will try to get things done and even as he fails, he will be the bull in the china shop wreaking havoc in a democracy already weakened by an erosion of trust in government and institutions, and the flourishing of mis- and dis-information.
Indeed, Trump’s constant and deliberate efforts to win a second term based on the malicious and simplistic scapegoating of immigrants is actually the best possible recipe for transforming the United States into one of the failed nations he so often maligns.
Democracy only thrives when voters are diligent in examining the messaging they hear from political candidates, particularly in this current environment where fake news, mythology, and unexamined theories of conspiracy proliferate.
Barring that, those who believe in Trump’s prescription of massive deportation as a key step toward “making America great again” will instead be pushing us over the cliff toward the end of democracy in the United States.
Edward Kissam is a leading researcher and advocate for strategies to deal with health issues impacting farmworker and immigrant communities. He has led research on farmworker and immigrant issues sponsored by the Department of Labor, the Commission on Agricultural Workers, and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture. He is also a trustee of the WKF Charitable Giving Fund.
