Donald Trump’s vow to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history would separate families and hurt the economy, witnesses testified during a Tuesday Senate hearing, as a top Republican on the committee warned that undocumented people living in the country should “get ready to leave”.
The president-elect has outlined an aggressive second-term immigration agenda that includes plans to declare a national emergency and deploy the US military to round up and expel millions of people living in the country without documentation. Trump has also vowed to end humanitarian protections for millions of people who fled violence, conflict or other disasters in their home countries.
The hearing, convened by Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, set out to explore the economic and human toll of a large-scale deportation operation. But the session also revealed the ideological tensions that have for decades thwarted legislative attempts at immigration reform.
“If you’re here illegally, get ready to leave. If you’re a criminal, we’re coming after you,” said Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate judiciary committee. When Republicans assume the Senate majority next year, Graham promised, his party would bring forward a “transformational border security bill” that would expand capacity at detention centers, boost the number of immigration officers and “finish the wall”.
Many of Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, including family separation, proved deeply unpopular during his first term in office. But a post-pandemic rise in global migration led to a surge of asylum claims at the US-Mexico border during the early years of the Biden administration. Americans strongly disapproved of Biden’s handling of the issue, and ranked immigration as a top election issue.
The November election was a “referendum on the federal border policies for the Biden-Harris administration”, the senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and the ranking member on the judiciary committee’s immigration subcommittee, declared during the hearing.
The Democratic senators insisted that there were areas of common ground between the parties – repeatedly stating their support for the removal of immigrants with criminal records and the need for better controls at the border. And they emphasized the broad support for protecting Dreamers, people brought to the country as children.
“Instead of mass deportations, [let’s have] mass accountability,” said the Democratic senator Dick Durbin, the committee’s chair. “Let’s fix our broken immigration system in a way that protects our country and honors our heritage as a nation of immigrants.”
Democrats turned to their witnesses – an immigration expert, a retired army major general and an undocumented prosecutor – to make the case that mass deportations would do far more harm than good.
“The president-elect’s mass deportation plans would crash the American economy, break up families and take a hammer to the foundations of our society by deporting nearly 4% of the entire US population,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the non-partisan American Immigration Council, testified to the committee.
An analysis by his group estimates that it would cost nearly $1tn to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plan and slash the annual GDP by between 4.2% and 6.8% – a level on par with the recession of 2008. Asked how Trump’s plans could affect Americans financially, Reichlin-Melnick said it would exacerbate inflation and cause food prices to rise.
“A single worksite raid in 2018 under the Trump administration at a beef plant in Tennessee led to ground beef prices rising by 25 cents for the year that the plant was out of operation following the raid,” he said.
Randy Manner, a retired US army major general and anti-Trump Republican, cautioned against using US troops to assist with a politically divisive domestic mission that he warned could undermine military readiness and erode public trust in the institution.
“The US military is the best trained in the world for its war fighting mission, but it is neither trained or equipped for immigration enforcement,” he said.
Among the witnesses invited to testify was Foday Turay, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who fled Sierra Leone as a child and testified that he did not know he was undocumented until he went to apply for a driver’s license. He is shielded from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
As a father, a husband, an immigrant and a prosecutor, Turay said the threat of mass deportations would affect him “on a personal level, on a community level and on a societal level.
“If I were to be deported, my wife and our son would be left without money to pay the mortgage. My son would also be without a father,” he said. He also warned that the widespread deployment of immigration agents could chill the ability of law enforcement to pursue criminals.
“As a prosecutor, I know how delicate the ties between law enforcement and immigrants can be if immigrants are afraid to cooperate with the police or prosecutors like myself because they’re afraid of deportation,” he added. “Mass deportation hurts all of us, our families, our community and our society.”
Republicans invited Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was beaten, raped and killed in August 2023 during a hiking trip. Officials say the suspect in her death was in the US illegally after killing a woman in his native El Salvador. Trump, with the support of the Morin family, has cited the murder as part of his appeal for stricter border controls.
“The American people should not feel afraid to live in their own homes,” Patty Morin told the committee. “We need to follow the laws that are already on the books, we need to close our borders. We need to protect American families.”
Seeking common ground, the Democratic senator Peter Welch of Vermont asked Morin if she would support a deportation policy that targeted undocumented people with a criminal record while pursuing a legal remedy for those who have lived and worked in the US with no criminal record.
“Are we saying it’s OK to come to America in an unlawful way?” Morin replied. “There has to be some kind of a line, a precedent, of what is lawful and what isn’t lawful.”
Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has been sharply critical of Trump’s immigration proposals, accused his Republican colleagues of distorting data and conflating fentanyl deaths with immigration. Citing federal statistics, he said the vast majority – more than 80% – of people prosecuted for trafficking the drug into the country were US citizens.
“If that’s a concern, then let’s address the heart of the concern and not just use it as a sound bite to further attack immigrants,” he said.
Ahead of the hearing, Padilla was among a group of Democratic senators who sent a letter to the president urging Biden to extend humanitarian protections to certain groups and to expedite the processing of applicants for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which shields from deportation undocumented people brought into the US as children.
“We urge you to act decisively between now and the inauguration of the president-elect to complete the important work of the past four years and protect immigrant families,” the letter said.
Earlier this week, the White House released a memo outlining Biden’s priorities for his final days in office that did not include any reference to immigration-related actions.
