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TRUMP’S PLAN FOR MASS DEPORTATIONS  
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Jamelle Bouie
May 24, 2024
New York Times
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_ At every opportunity, Trump has placed the mass deportation of
millions of people at the center of his campaign. It is a promise. And
the promises a presidential candidate makes while on the trail are the
promises a president tries to keep. _

In 1954, the U.S. government staged mass deportations in the American
Southwest,

 

Among the worst episodes in American history are those moments when
the federal government deploys the full weight of its power against
the most vulnerable people in the country: the Trail of Tears and the
Fugitive Slave Act in the 19th century and Japanese internment in the
middle of the 20th, to name three.

If he is granted a second term in the White House, Donald Trump hopes
to add his own entry to this ignominious book of national shame.

Trump’s signature promise, during the 2016 presidential election,
was that he would build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. His
signature promise, this time around, is that he’ll use his power as
president to deport as many as 20 million people
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the United States.

“Following the Eisenhower model
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crowd
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Iowa last September, “we will carry out the largest domestic
deportation operation in American history.”It cannot be overstated
how Trump’s deportation plan would surely rank as one of the worst
crimes perpetrated by the federal government on the people of this
country. Most of the millions of unauthorized and undocumented
immigrants in the United States are essentially permanent residents.
They raise families, own homes and businesses, pay taxes and
contribute to their communities. For the most part, they are as
embedded in the fabric of this nation as native-born and naturalized
American citizens are.

What Trump and his aide Stephen Miller hope to do is to tear those
lives apart, rip those communities to shreds and fracture the entire
country in the process.

“The Trump immigration plan,” notes Radley Balko
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journalist who writes primarily on civil liberties, in his Substack
newsletter, “would be the second-largest forced displacement of
human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous
partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement
during World War II.”

What is the plan, exactly? It begins, as Miller explained
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an interview with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk last year, with
creating a national deportation force consisting of agents from
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the Border Patrol and other federal agencies, as well
as the National Guard and local law enforcement officials. The
administration would empower this deportation force to scour the
country for unauthorized and undocumented immigrants. It would move
from state to state, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood and,
finally, house to house, looking for people who, according to Trump
and Miller, do not belong. This deportation force would raid
workplaces and stage public roundups, to create a climate of fear and
intimidation.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it isn’t actually all that
easy to determine who may be an unauthorized or undocumented
immigrant. But these won’t be selective apprehensions. How could
they be? Instead, what we’ll see in practice is an indiscriminate
roundup of anyone who might appear to be an immigrant — a mass
campaign of racial and ethnic profiling.

Because it would be beyond the capacity of the federal government to
immediately return detainees to their “home” countries, the Trump
team also plans to build
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holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for
immigrants on land near the Texas border. Internment camps,
essentially.

It is worth remembering here that in addition to its wanton cruelty,
Trump’s policy of child separation was also noteworthy for the poor
conditions suffered by separated families living in government
facilities. Child detainees lacked adequate food
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and sanitation. There were also reports of mistreatment
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as in the case of the Border Patrol agents who were accused of telling
detained women to drink out of toilet bowls.

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of
thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the
targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support
for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really
are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country
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then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we
neutralize it.

There are roughly 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United
States, according to a recent estimate
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the Pew Research Center. Trump’s number of “probably 15 million
and maybe as many as 20 million” is pulled from nowhere — an
assumption based on the inchoate sense that the official numbers are
wrong and there must be more “illegals” to apprehend than anyone
truly realizes.

To reach this goal, Miller and Trump would almost certainly have to
round up citizens as well. But that is also part of the plan. On the
first day of his second term, the campaign has let it be known, Trump
will sign an executive order
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withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government
benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United
States.”Neither Trump nor Miller appears to have made any
distinction between the undocumented children of undocumented
immigrants and the native-born children of undocumented immigrants,
which fits their opposition to the Constitution’s guarantee
of birthright citizenship
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the 14th Amendment. Under the Trump deportation plan, citizenship will
not save those who have the wrong background.

The Trump campaign’s promise to detain and deport millions of
immigrants, along with many American citizens, is a promise to plunge
the country into an authoritarian nightmare. It is also a promise of
strife and pervasive civil conflict.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Americans responded to an effort
of this sort with violence. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Act, which essentially deputized all authorities and private
citizens in free states as slave catchers required to return all
escaped slaves to their enslavers, came widespread, armed resistance
to efforts to carry out the law. You did not have to be sympathetic to
the plight of the enslaved to be outraged by the notion that you could
be dragooned into acting as a bounty hunter for state-sanctioned human
traffickers.

The political consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act, to the dismay of
Southern lawmakers, was to radicalize countless Northerners against
the so-called Slave Power and raise sectional tensions to a point of
almost no return. The law did not cause the Civil War, but it was the
provocation that set the stage for a decade of conflict that led,
inexorably, to war.

Do we not think that a mass deportation program, with roving bands of
armed agents, would result in similar upheaval? Do we not think that
there would be violent resistance to agents storming homes, churches
and businesses to seize and detain people? And do we not think that a
Trump who wanted, during his first term, to shoot protesters
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see this as an opportunity to do so — a hoped-for chance to invoke
the Insurrection Act, mobilize the military and crush his political
opponents?

We talk often, these days, of illiberalism. It is has become a bit of
a buzzword. Often the focus is illiberalism in elite spaces, usually
the classrooms and common areas of selective colleges. Sometimes the
focus is on particular politicians. But what we are seeing here from
Trump isn’t simply a distaste for liberal values; it is a taste for
genuine tyranny and bona fide despotism, one that complements his
endless praise for dictators and strongmen.

Rhetoric matters, and what candidates say is not simply for show. At
every opportunity, Trump has placed the mass deportation of millions
of people at the center of his campaign. It is a promise. And the
promises a presidential candidate makes while on the trail are the
promises a president tries to keep.

_Based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington, Jamelle Bouie
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Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political
correspondent for Slate magazine._

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* deportations
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* Immigrants
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* Fugitive Slave Law
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* Donald Trump
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