Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
In an early morning social media post, Trump responded “TRUE!!!” to a post by Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who wrote on 8 November that the next administration “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program”.
Since his decisive victory, Trump has said he intends to make good on his campaign promise to execute mass deportations, beginning on the first day of his presidency. But many aspects of what he has described as the “largest deportation program in American history” remain unclear.
Trump has previously suggested he would rely on wartime powers, military troops and sympathetic state and local leaders. Such a sprawling campaign – and the use of military personnel to carry it out – is almost certain to draw legal challenges and pushback from Democratic leaders, some of whom have already said they would refuse to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda.
Through personnel announcements, the president-elect has put together a team of loyalists and hardliners to implement a second-term immigration crackdown.
Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in his first administration, was named “border czar” with a wide-ranging remit. In a short social media post announcing the position, Trump said Homan would be “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.
Also returning for a second term is Stephen Miller, a chief defender of the last administration’s most controversial immigration policies, including the use of family separation as a means of deterrence. Miller was named White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security adviser, giving him far-reaching influence over immigration policy.
Rounding out the team, he nominated the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, a loyalist with a long record as an immigration hardliner, to be his next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Experts and advocates say a deportation campaign on the scale Trump has outlined would raise legal and logistical challenges, not to mention the soaring costs and infrastructure needed to detail and deport millions of people, many of whom have lived in the country for at least a decade, contribute to the workforce and share a household with US citizen family members.
Trump and Miller have described plans to federalize state national guard personnel and deploy them for immigration enforcement, including sending troops from friendly Republican-governed states into neighboring states with governors who decline to participate. Miller has also advocated for building large-scale detention “camps” and tents.
In his first post-election interview, Trump told NBC News that he had “no choice” but to implement a mass deportation plan, regardless of cost.
“It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not – really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960bn over a decade.
Trump at various points claimed he would deport at least 15 million – and even as many as 20 million – people who are in the US illegally, but the figure is unverified.
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There were an estimated 11 million people living in the United States without authorization as of 2022, according to an analysis by Pew Research. Migration to the US border reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 before dropping dramatically in 2024, following stepped-up enforcement by Mexico and an asylum clampdown by the Biden administration.
It is unclear who the Trump administration would target for deportation. His campaign trail rhetoric often failed to distinguish between immigrants who have lawful status and those in the country illegally. And throughout the campaign, Trump claimed that immigrants crossing the US southern border in recent years were driving up crime, even though violent crime is down across the country and studies show immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.
During the campaign, Trump’s team repeatedly refused to rule out deporting Dreamers, young adults brought to the US as children, hundreds of thousands of whom are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca).
Questions remain about how the raids would be conducted and where people would be detained. Civil liberties advocates have already raised concerns about people with lawful status or even US citizens being swept up in a sprawling dragnet.
Meanwhile, advocates have pushed back against Trump’s assertion that he enters office with a mandate to carry out mass raids. They point to data that has found most people do not support mass deportations, especially when respondents are informed about the potential impacts on the economy, the workforce and American families.
“The term strategy is clear, foment fear, panic and chaos into our communities, because as bullies, this is what they thrive on,” Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for Dreamers said during a post-election debrief. She added: “Trump may be re-elected, but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities.”
