Trump’s plan to deport 14 to 21 million people

Donald Trump hasn’t shown a lot of interest in the specific details of the fantasies in the Heritage Foundation’s Penthouse Forum letter to reactionary authoritarianism, with one striking exception. From a Time magazine interview Trump did in May:

The topic on which Trump had the most concrete details is his plan to deport many millions of undocumented immigrants. . . . Trump told Time he would target between 15 million and 20 million people who he said are undocumented in the US. The exact number of undocumented immigrants is not clear. It is probably smaller than Trump says.

Petty details like that are unlikely to slow down a second Trump administration, especially given his plans for how this cleansing of the national blood and soil is going to be carried out.

Trump was asked by Time if these efforts would include the military:

“It would,” Trump said, adding, “when we talk military, generally speaking, I talk National Guard.”

He added that he would “have no problem using the military, per se,” although he thinks the National Guard would suffice.

He does not think that laws meant to prevent the use of the military against civilians inside the US without congressional approval would apply to his effort.

“These aren’t civilians,” Trump said of migrants. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.”

He also repeated the conspiracy theory, for which there is no evidence, that “fighting age” males from China are somehow embedding themselves in the US.

“You have to do what you have to do to stop crime and to stop what’s taking place at the border,” he said.

Trump tried to downplay the idea that there would be massive camps of detained migrants like those described to The New York Times by his immigration policy mastermind Stephen Miller, since, according to Trump, he would be deporting people so fast.

“We’re not leaving them in the country. We’re bringing them out,” he said. When asked under what authority he would make all of this happen, Trump suggested he would use federal money to pressure local police.

“There’s a possibility that some won’t want to participate, and they won’t partake in the riches, you know,” he said.

Any action Trump takes is sure to be challenged in court. He promised to comply with whatever federal courts say.

“I have great respect for the Supreme Court,” Trump said.

A friend notes that the historical precedents here are a bit problematic:

The scale of some other notable less-than-voluntary short term population shifts of the 20th-21st centuries:

Partition of India: ~15 million out of ~390 million, with ~1 million dead. All numbers here have sizeable error bars given the chaotic nature of the event. And it wasn’t entirely a forced move, but it wasn’t precisely not a forced move either. Many migrants basically had to go to avoid the wrath of the religious majority where they lived.

Whatever the numbers, the event was a horror.

Post-WWII expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, others: ~13 million, ~1-2 million dead, hard to put a number on total population as you’d have to define your terms first. This one has a certain amount of justification, given what everyone had just been through and how the post-Yalta world was to be organized; it was no less horrific for all that.

Holocaust: Again terminology must be defined. ~9 million Jews in Europe, ~6 million killed, many fled, a few million left at the end, mostly in USSR where the Germans didn’t get control. The definition of horror.

Earlier analogues would include Jackson’s Indian removals, with something under 100,000 removed from the South to west of the Mississippi, with maybe 10% dying in the process.

Point being that there has never been anything on this scale tried by a prosperous nation at peace. Everything on this scale has been a catastrophe. It is very difficult to imagine it happening without a large toll in deaths, encampments, lesser rights violations, and reciprocal violence. Especially if Trump succeeds in his promise to let the deportation squads do what they will as far as identifying whom to detain, and using their own discretion as to their methods. With dangling pardons for all removing any restraint. In theory nobody gets dropped back in Honduras without their due process. Janet Napolitano expressed some confidence that Trump’s efforts would run aground on such difficulties. It is hard to share her confidence in institutions, given the conditions on the ground if Trump’s party gets the trifecta plus the courts they already own.

There’s also the theory that he always talks big and never delivers. The wall fell rather short of 2000 miles, Mexico never paid, and he never got the explicit Muslim ban he wanted. Maybe so, maybe so. Maybe he doesn’t get anywhere near 15 million deportees. Maybe he only gets 7 million, or 2 million, or less. He is however going to try. The plans are being drawn up. Stephen Miller has been working on them for four years. There aren’t going to be any establishment people in his hires, all MAGA.

I dearly wish this a little more of a focus point in the election talk. The MAGAs are the MAGAs. They want this, and will not be swayed by arguments that this sort of massive effort necessarily would be a moral horror on the ground. But there are also a certain squishy middle who just aren’t really thinking about it. Well, we already deport people and he’ll just do a little more. Not realizing what the numbers mean here.* They’re ignoring, intentionally or otherwise, what is actually being talked about. If confronted with the spectre of millions of deputized posses, and camps, they might blanche a little. Maybe talking about what he is going to try would be enough to shift Pennsylvania.


*This is another case of avoiding the old chestnut “we’ve established what you are, now we’re negotiating the price.” Quantity matters. Deporting a few thousand is not the same as deporting 15 million. It’s not the same universe. Lumping (why your school’s transgressions are no different from anyone else’s) and splitting (why your rival’s sins are uniquely bad) should be left for sports arguments.

Another friend notes that the classic reactionary centrist rationalization that oh it won’t be all that bad because he’s lazy and undisciplined misses what will likely be a key dynamic of a second Trump administration:

Project 2025 is going to involve putting Trump loyalists throughout the federal government. That going to mean a whole lot of “working towards the Fuhrer” ambitious types who will want to make a name for themselves by acting in the cruelest fashion. There will be massive potential for unspeakable cruelty, all while Trump works a few hours a day and spends most of his time watching cable news and bragging on the phone.

Since it’s apparently a new policy at LGM to make illogical arguments that the accuracy of someone’s analysis of whether Biden or Harris is more likely to beat Trump is somehow a function of how much that individual personally has to lose from a second Trump term, I’ll note that my parents came to this country in the year I was born. This means that according to one of Trump’s closest legal advisors, who also happens to have been given a distinguished visiting chair at my own university, I’m not a U.S. citizen per the Privileges and Immunities clause of the 14th amendment. This in turn means I could be deported from this country with basically no due process, as indeed many Mexican-American citizens were during Operation Wetback not so very long ago — Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both old enough to remember that page of American history anyway — so this isn’t exactly some crazy hypothetical.

My parents spent the first seven years of my life under the constant stress that their legal immigration status was about to expire, and towards the end of that time nearly moved to, respectively, Spain, Switzerland, and back to Mexico. That didn’t happen because in the end somebody at NIH decided that my father’s work there was valuable enough to get him included in a group of researchers who were given permanent resident alien status via an act of Congress. So I suppose my own story is one of both precarity and privilege, as most such stories are.