On the campaign trail, president-elect Donald Trump promoted a rallying cry demanding mass deportations of as many as 20 million people – a hyper-inflated statistic that exceeds the estimated total of undocumented population in the US by millions, suggesting he might go so far as to round up immigrants in the country who have legal protections, too.
But despite the US already having the largest immigration detention system worldwide, mass deportations on that scale would require an enforcement regime that doesn’t yet exist. Case in point: in Trump’s first term, authorities removed about 1.5 million people over four years, leveling a devastating toll on the families involved but falling far short of the mass repatriations Trump had aspired to back then.
To multiply that number exponentially this time around would require resources, personnel and funding that are absent from the current immigration system. Alternatively, taking a more incremental approach to deport even a million people a year would cost taxpayers somewhere around $88bn annually – or nearly $1tn over more than a decade.
So, as stump speeches evolve into more concrete plans during the presidential transition, Trump and his team have coalesced around several demographics to focus on detaining and deporting first (although if your grandmother gets swept up as collateral damage, Trump’s incoming border czar doesn’t seem to mind). One of their highest stated priority demographics: “criminal” immigrants.
It’s true that some immigrants commit crimes, and that a handful of particularly heinous attacks in recent memory have made that front-of-mind. But Trump’s fixation on what he’s labeled “migrant crime” supposedly overtaking the nation is not only untrue but it belies the fact that, historically, immigrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. For immigrants who have yet to earn US citizenship, there’s a clear and at times existential incentive to remain on the right side of the law: deportation could mean returning to a country where their lives or livelihoods might be at risk.
Yet after Trump and his surrogates have so often used “criminals” as the example of their immigration enforcement priorities – especially when persuading non-base audiences, their argument has proved persuasive to many, and even to a subset of immigrants.
Some want to believe that the vast majority of non-citizens who have worked hard, paid taxes and otherwise led upstanding lives in the US have little to fear. That the people who will be deported aren’t friends, neighbors, family members, co-workers or even themselves, but dangerous others who somehow “deserve” it.
Instead, as soon as day one of Trump’s second term, the administration is expected to reverse current policy that prioritizes people who pose threats to national security, border security and public safety for immigration enforcement. That could potentially force officials to revert to the chaotic situation under Trump’s first term, when undocumented immigrants were broadly targeted and the country’s finite law enforcement resources were diverted away from real risks.
Then, if Trump wants to make good on his campaign promise quickly, his earliest mass deportations may at least in part involve those most easy to locate – such as immigrants already in federal detention facilities, about 60% of whom have no criminal record (while many more detainees only have minor infractions).
Other low-hanging fruit to pick up, detain and deport include people who report to their immigration check-ins, change their home addresses in government databases when they move and go into work before getting caught up in a raid – in short, people playing by the rules and trying to make a living, some of whom may have been in the US for decades and buoy up the economy.
Even the “criminals” Trump has in mind for his mass deportations may not be who most Americans are envisioning. During the election, Trump made unsubstantiated and bizarre remarks about the US being a “dumping ground for the whole world to put their criminals into”. He claimed with no evidence that the newcomers arriving today, the overwhelming majority of whom are seeking protection or a better life, are actually coming from prisons and mental institutions in their home countries. And, late in the race, his campaign homed in on two cities roughly 1,200 miles apart – Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio – to constantly portray migrants, and in particular migrants of color, as threats to Americans’ safety.
For Aurora, Trump used about a dozen arrests of Venezuelans allegedly linked to a transnational gang to declare the city a “war zone” and announce an impending deportation operation named after the Colorado suburb. With a fifth of Aurora’s residents foreign-born, mothers are now crying every day after they drop off their kids at school, unsure of what Trump’s return to the presidency will mean for their family. Latinos in the community are even expressing concerns about gathering together in groups, in case of a raid.
In Springfield, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, insistently connected the city’s large Haitian immigrant population with an uptick in the murder rate – never mind that the local county’s Republican top prosecutor said that in his 21-year career, not a single Haitian had been involved in a murder case there.
After Trump and Vance used their national platform to disparage Springfield and its immigrant residents, the city received bomb threats explicitly based in anti-immigrant hate. Now, members of Springfield’s Haitian community – many of whom are in the US legally – are moving elsewhere, afraid that staying put will mean deportation come January.
In Aurora, Springfield and the rest of the country, Trump’s “criminals” are whoever he wants them to be.
And while he may not have the infrastructure needed to repatriate as many millions of people as he would hope, Trump has already unleashed a world of panic and pain through his looming threat of mass deportations and family separations against any immigrant – legal or undocumented – who he decides doesn’t belong in his America.
