The centerpiece of a second Trump term would be a moral and economic catastrophe
By 
Unlike Dobbs, mass deportation polls relatively well, which is why anti-immigrant demagoguery is a centerpiece of the Trump/Vance campaign. But like Dobbs, most people would hate even a scaled-down version of their mass deportation policy once they see it in action:
If Trump is a classic American confidence man, then mass deportation is his miracle tonic — a magical tincture that treats all ailments and cures all maladies. And like any traveling salesman, Trump is careful not to mention the side effects of this potent treatment. But not only are there side effects; the potion doesn’t treat the disease and may kill the patient.
It is obvious that mass deportation would be a humanitarian disaster — if past precedent is any indication of future results, the forced migration and detention of millions of people is very likely to kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of those caught in the dragnet of involuntary removal. If put into place, the plan would destroy communities and tear families apart. And given Trump’s hostility to birthright citizenship, there is every reason to think that his deportation regime would fall on American citizens as well, especially those with ties to the undocumented.
A little less obvious is the extent to which mass deportation would plunge the United States into economic darkness. According to a new report from the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, a mass deportation plan designed to expel 13.3 million undocumented immigrants over about 10 years would crash the economy, immiserate millions of Americans and siphon nearly $1 trillion from the federal government.
During Tuesday’s debate, Vance said the Trump deportation plan would start with about one million alleged criminal offenders. To deport one million immigrants per year, the report says, “would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going toward building detention camps.” Even assuming some measure of “self-deportation,” the federal government would have to build “hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities to arrest, detain, process and remove” all targeted immigrants, at an estimated cost of $66 billion per year.
On top of that, the government would need to spend $7 billion per year to conduct the arrests, $12.6 billion per year to carry out legal processing for arrestees and an average of $2.1 billion to remove these immigrants from the country. None of this includes the cost of personnel, which could raise the overall price tag quite a bit. “Even carrying out one million at-large arrests per year,” the report says, “would require ICE to hire over 30,000 new law enforcement agents and staff, instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government.” Assuming an average annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent, this deportation program would cost at least $967.9 billion over 10 years.
For the cost of this program, the report notes, the United States could build more than 40,000 new elementary schools, construct more than 2.9 million new homes, pay full tuition and expenses for more than 8.9 million Americans to attend an in-state public college for four years, fund the Head Start program for most of the next century and buy a brand-new car for about 20.4 million people.
If Harris loses the single biggest factor will probably be inflation in food prices, and the winning candidate’s policy agenda is a tariff and deportation program that will cause them to soar. The American swing voter!