Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Will Carry High Costs

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At a campaign rally in the border state of Arizona on Thursday, Donald Trump woke the crowd with a remark. Largest mass deportation in US history promisedafter lamenting that the country had “become a dustbin for the world.”

This promise to round up and remove the estimated 11 million immigrants without permanent legal status in the United States is one of Trump’s signature campaign promises in 2024, and one of his biggest plaudits. Trump has I personally worry that stump speeches focus on less divisive issues The New York Times reported this week that economics — let’s call it that — is boring its audience.

A lot latest media analysis They discovered that a second Trump administration would face numerous challenges in effecting mass deportation on this scale, and that the effort would require Herculean strength. Reworking every aspect of criminal justice and immigration detention systems.

A study by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, calculated that: Deportation effort would require hundreds of new detention facilitiesand hundreds of thousands of new immigration agents, judges and other personnel. Financial analysis shows that mass deportation on this scale cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite current rates of enforcement, detention, and deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already “impeding the ability to maintain a safe and secure environment.” facilities for staff and detainees, according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report released last month. Many of these detention facilities are run by private companies based in former prisons. Bloomberg News this week Trump’s deportation plan It could mean a huge financial opportunity for operators like CoreCivic and GEO Group.

To get around the already backlogged deportation system, Trump and his advisers said: We intend to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The law, used during the two World Wars, allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport without ordinary legal process immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the United States during the war. Its use would raise immediate legal challenges, and legal experts are divided on how such an effort would fare in the courts. Due to the language of the law, the United States is not at war with any country from which large numbers of immigrants come. But courts generally defer to the executive branch regarding such authority.

Enforcement efforts will likely include the use of new surveillance technology. Some technology observers Worry about the rise of technology that is already ubiquitous at the border, including watchtowers, high-tech balloons, hidden license plate readers and biometric readers.

Trump also repeatedly said: plans to mobilize local law enforcement Waging elements of the deportation agenda alongside the National Guard in states where the governor is sympathetic to that goal.

Some law enforcement leaders They had already announced that they would not participate in mass deportation efforts. Even authorities who express concern about the challenges posed by large influxes of immigrants have little interest in mass deportations. in Whitewater, Wisconsin, Police Chief Dan Meyer told ProPublica he was angry in efforts to politicize the situation in his town, where at least 1,000 mostly Nicaraguan immigrants have recently settled.

Meyer said his department is dealing with “very real challenges associated with so many people coming from another country,” mostly related to poverty, language barriers and administrative challenges (which many immigrants do not have and struggle to get). , driver’s licenses.

But what Meyer said didn’t happen was this: immigrant crime spreeIt’s a claim that has been a cornerstone of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Meyer told ProPublica that new immigrants commit no more crimes than other Whitewater residents.

Another police chief in Aurora, Colorado, says Trump’s claims do not reflect the reality on the ground. Chef Todd Chamberlain I told NBC News earlier this month that the city was pretty safeEven though Trump described it as “occupied” by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua (TDA). Trump determined Aurora, epicenter of deportation efforts.

Chamberlain said there was blame involved with TDA members, but Trump’s rhetoric dramatically exaggerated the situation. This week, NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland Security Approximately 600 immigrants with possible ties to TDA have been identified throughout the United StatesHowever, some experts cited by the news source said that this number is definitely an undercount.

Beyond the legal and logistical challenges, Trump’s deportation plan has profound potential economic costs. “This would certainly cause disruption and concern.” An Arkansas business leader told the New York Times, referring to the labor that immigrants provide in areas that are unattractive or where job opportunities are plentiful for U.S. workers. acute shortage of homegrown labor. Some analyzes suggest that a mass deportation could cut off more than a trillion dollars of output from the U.S. economy and It will cause a contraction equivalent to the Great Recession of 2009.

None of this explains the human cost of mass deportations. Writing for Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera tells the story of Marco, a Honduran who works construction and landscaping in Georgia. Marco had been deported before in 2010 and had planned to make peace with life in Honduras. But the threat of violence from local gangs there and the possibility of earning 10 times his annual income, Brought it back to the US in 2021.

Like most undocumented people in the U.S., Marco lives in a mixed-status household, meaning “some relatives have citizenship or a green card, and some have neither.” If Marco is deported, Herrera writes, “The ones who will really miss him are his family, the girls who wait every sundown for their uncle to come home, with mud on their boots and sawdust on their shirt.”