Trump's deportation army
The former president's vow to deport 15 million people is the cruelest, most illiberal, most openly authoritarian campaign promise in modern U.S. history. Oh, and it would also destroy the economy.
Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.
But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.
“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”
The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing. Perhaps it’s the sort of bluster Trump often spurts out in the moment, but never bothers to implement.
We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.
Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.
Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.
(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.)
In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.
I hate to go all Godwin here, but when you combine Miller’s plan and personal history with Trump’s recent rhetoric portraying immigrants as diseased “animals” turned loose from foreign prisons and mental facilities who “poison the blood” of the country — or his ridiculous descriptions of migrants as “military-aged” — you could be forgiven for noticing that we’re accumulating the necessary ingredients of a genocide. It certainly checks a lot of boxes. At the very least, they’re creating the conditions for a mass humanitarian crisis.
Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship.
Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.
The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.
The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”
They deportation army Miller and Trump want to assemble would be larger than any police force in the federal government, and if they get their way, would likely exceed the size of the U.S. Army itself. It would be populated with Trump loyalists excited by the idea of breaking up families and dumping peaceful undocumented people in countries they barely know.
Trump approached the presidency like he ran his businesses — like a mob boss. He thought the Justice Department should have been his personal law firm, and has vowed to weaponize it against his opponents should he win again. It isn’t at all difficult to imagine how, once in place, this deportation force might be used to enforce Trump’s other authoritarian impulses and campaign promises, like infiltrating blue cities to “fight crime,'“ arrest homeless people, or to beat — and possibly shoot — people who stage protests against his policies.
Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.
Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.
Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try.
The logistics of deporting 15 million people
Depending on which rally or interview you consult, Trump has put his deportation goal somewhere between 15 and 20 million people. The Pew Foundation estimates there are about 10 million undocumented people in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security puts the figure at about 11 million. The far-right Center for Immigration Studies puts the high end at around 14 million.
This means that already, Trump is promising to deport more people than there are undocumented immigrants in the country. Which means he’s promising to deport between 1 and 6 million people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens.
It’s pretty clear that the distinction matters little to them. This passage from the Washington Post piece last February didn’t get quite as much attention as other components of the plan, but it really hammers home the fact that Trump plans to ignore what the law and Constitution say about citizenship.
The Trump campaign has also said he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.
Children of undocumented immigrants are U.S. citizens. It’s enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. We live in a surreal political moment, one in which the absurdity of the latest thing can quickly get lost in the absurdity of all the other things. But this is worth some added emphasis: The man currently favored to be the next president is promising to unilaterally and illegally strip 4 million people of their citizenship.
I asked several immigration experts what it would take to deport 15 million people. That figure is twice the population of New York City. In fact it’s about the size of the three largest U.S. cities combined — New York, L.A., and Chicago — plus Pittsburgh. A state of 15 million people would be the fifth most populous in the country — ahead of Pennsylvania, and behind only California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
The pre-World War II Jewish population of Europe — including the Soviet Union — was about 9 million. So just in terms of transporting people, we’re looking at an operation that would need to be two thirds larger than the Nazi transport of Jews during the Holocaust — if they’d managed to get to every Jewish person on the continent.
The Trump immigration plan would be the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II.
What would it cost? In 2017, ICE estimated that it cost an average of $10,854 to deport one person, or about $14,000 in today’s dollars. Under this calculation, Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people would cost about $210 billion, or about 14 percent more than the annual budget of the U.S. Army.
But this estimate is almost certainly too low. Under current U.S. policy, undocumented people are typically only deported if they’ve been arrested, convicted of crimes, or come into contact with the criminal justice system in some other way. ICE keeps a database of people it wants to deport — generally people who have criminal records or have been deported in the past. When cooperating police agencies arrest someone in the database, they’re held and handed over to ICE for deportation.
Trump’s plan would require deportation officials to go into cities, workplaces, colleges, and neighborhoods, find undocumented immigrants, and forcibly extract them. He did some of this during his first term, but it was sporadic and mostly for show. This would be on a much, much larger scale.
These will be people who for the most part are indistinguishable from legal residents and citizens, and whose only offense is to be in the country without documentation (which is a civil offense, not a criminal one). That means it’s a near certainty that a significant number of people who are here legally would be mistakenly detained. Some would be deported. And once they’re gone, they’d have to battle a backlogged and bureaucratic morass of an immigration system to get back in.
Usually, refugee crises are brought on by large groups of people either voluntarily migrating from regions struck by war or natural disaster, or armies forcibly moving people en masse. Trump’s deportation plan would mean identifying the undocumented people in virtually every decent sized city, town, and county in the United States, detaining those people in some regional facility, transporting them to a bus station or airport, then flying, walking, or driving them across the border.
Imagine what it would take to evacuate the entirety of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Imagine the number of buses and you’d need, the number of holding facilities, and everything you’d need to staff and equip those facilities. You’d need security. You’d need medical staff and food services. You’d need bathroom and shower facilities. You’d need janitorial staff, bus drivers, and pilots.
Now imagine moving a population equal in size to the populations of those cities, but spread out all over the United States. In addition to Miller’s tent encampments along the border, you’d also need detainment facilities in every major city to hold immigrants as they await transport. Sanctuary cities would resist letting the administration use space in their jails. But even in cooperating jurisdictions, there wouldn’t be nearly enough available space. In a piece for the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein consulted with experts who made the dystopian observation that immigrants may need to be “stored” in warehouses and abandoned shopping malls.
Currently, removals are handled by the Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO) division of ICE. At the moment, that office has 7,600 employees. Last year, ERO removed about 142,000 people with a budget of $4.7 billion. If we apply these numbers to Trump’s 15 million plan and spread it out over a 4-year term, Trump would need the ERO or an equivalent agency to increase its capacity by a factor of about 26. So the office would need to increase to more than 200,000 employees, and a budget of $122 billion.
But that’s just the “muscle,” or the people who carry out the removals. ICE also has investigators, administrative staff, and attorneys who argue immigration cases in court. Overall, ICE has about 20,000 employees, with a budget of $8.5 billion. If we assume the current staffing and budget would need to expand at scale with the number of removals, Trump’s deportation plan would need 530,000 employees. That’s about 70,000 more staff than there are current active-duty troops in the U.S. Army.
The overall ICE budget would need to increase to $225 billion — 80 percent more than the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, and 20 percent more than the Army’s 2025 budget.
You’d also need to multiply the number of immigration courts and judges. Currently there are 69 immigration courts with 650 immigration judges. To keep the current ratio of courts and judges to deportations, you’d need more than 1,800 courts and over 17,000 judges. The current budget for these courts is $981 million. That would need to jump to $26 billion.
These are rough estimates, of course. Some ICE removals are done in conjunction with other agencies, like Border Patrol, and it’s at least possible that current ICE agents could be arresting, detaining, and deporting more people than they currently do. Economies of scale would likely reduce the overall costs, but only to a point.
You’d quickly start to hit capacity limits. You can only cram so any new beds into detention centers before you need to build or co-opt more facilities. You can only cram so many new hearings into already over-scheduled courtrooms before you’ll need to find or build new courtrooms.
As of January, federal immigration courts were already working a backlog of 3 million cases. Adding millions more cases would likely grind the system to a halt.
But that’s just the beginning of the detainment problem. Trump also wants to end “catch and release” — the process of releasing migrants and undocumented immigrants while their cases are pending. (As is often the case, Trump’s criticism here is based on a lie. The overwhelming majority of immigrants — 83 percent — released under this policy do return for their hearings.)
Currently, Congress has budgeted $3.4 billion to detain about 41,500 migrants per day. If Trump ended catch and release merely to detain everyone whose case is currently backlogged in the immigration courts, the federal government would need to increase capacity from 41,500 to 3 million. That’s about 3 times the combined population of every state and federal prison in the country.
According to the Cato Institute’s David Bier, adding just 1.5 million new beds “would come in at a rate of about $129 billion per year, or 16 times ICE’s total annual budget.” Under Trump’s plan, you’d need to double that figure just to accommodate the backlog, never mind the facilities to house migrants going forward. House Speaker Johnson would need to find an additional $258 billion, or about twice the annual budget of the state of the Florida, just to detain the current backlog.
The Trump administration tried to solve this problem by forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while their cases are processed, a policy that’s inhumane, hasn’t prevented more migrants, and has proven impossible to implement at scale. And as I’ll discuss in a moment, it’s a policy that will probably be impossible in a second Trump administration.
Currently, it costs the federal government about $165 to detain one undocumented immigrant for one day. It costs significantly more to detain families, which would comprise a large percentage of new deportees under Trump’s plan.
The average deportation process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. But the current backlog is prolonging that process. It also takes significantly longer if the person has been in the country for a long period of time, which are precisely the people Trump’s plan would need to target. It also takes longer if the person’s home country won’t take them back. And of course, suddenly overwhelming the system with a flood of new cases will only make the typical case take longer to resolve, which means yet more time in detention.
There would also be significant transportation costs. Mexican immigrants are generally deported by walking or driving them across the border. But deportations to most other countries will require a flight.
Bier says the federal government currently runs about 100 to 150 removal flights per month, with around 150 deportees on each flight. Those would need to be ramped up significantly. In 2016, the Orwellian-named “ICE Air” flew 110,000 deportees overseas at a cost of about $2,600 (in today’s dollars) each. If we assume the proportion of deportees who need to be flown back remains about the same, we’re looking another $2 billion or so per year for flights alone.
Miller mapped out this part of the plan in his interview with Kirk:
So you build these facilities where then you're able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.
On Thursday and Sunday are the flights back to different Asian countries. So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets. And that's how you're able to scale and achieve the efficiency.
Miller’s plan for the “efficient” mass removal of human beings will hit a major snag when deportees’ home countries stop accepting them. This is already the case with governments hostile to the U.S., like those of Venezuela and Cuba. For deportations to those countries, the feds often send people back with one-way commercial tickets. The federal government did this about 6,100 times in 2016. Those flights are much more expensive.
But the list of countries refusing deportees will almost certainly grow. Some will refuse just to protest the deportation policy itself. In addition to all the other damaging consequences of Trump’s plan, it means fewer remittances back into these countries’ economies. Other nations might reject deportees in retaliation for other hostile Trump policies, or perhaps just because he’s fond of calling them “shithole” countries. It seems likely that the Mexican government will get considerably less cooperative on immigration and asylum seekers, including the “remain in Mexico” policy, once Trump sends special forces into that country without its consent, or starts bombing it with drones — both of which he has promised.
At best, less cooperation from these countries of origin would mean more expensive, surreptitious deportations through commercial airlines. But you can’t just start flying hundreds of thousands of deportees on commercial airlines. So we’ll likely end up in a much worse scenario — hundreds of thousands of people in Miller’s “tent camps” awaiting deportation . . . with nowhere to send them.
The immigration experts I spoke to fear that the Trump administration could respond by creating a sort of Guantanamo Bay for deportees, or dump them in whatever other country that’s willing to take them — likely a developing country bribed with lots of foreign aid. The U.K. recently passed a controversial new law sending asylum seekers to Rwanda while their cases are adjudicated. But even that policy is expected to top out at about 50,000 people. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands.
How they’d do it
So how would Trump get 530,000 additional immigration enforcement officers? Miller has suggested a few possibilities.
First, he has mentioned the National Guard. Specifically, Miller says Republican governors could activate Guard reservists to carry out the plan. He’s probably right that most Republican governors would oblige. As of now 14 Republican governors have sent Guard troops to the border at the request of Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott.
Currently, the Guard has 325,000 reservists. Let’s assume that half are in states with Republican governors. That’s about 162,500 troops, assuming Trump could get all of them.
He’d still be far short of what he needs. In fact, even if half the National Guard reservists, all 20,000 ICE agents, all 21,000 Border Patrol officers, all 37,000 FBI agents, all 5,000 DEA agents, all 2,600 ATF agents, and all 10,000 Homeland Security Investigations agents were tasked solely with rounding up undocumented immigrants full time, Trump would still be about 282,000 enforcement agents short.
Trump and Miller have also suggested they could get help from state, local, and county police. There are major constitutional problems with asking state and local police to enforce federal immigration law. It’s an issue currently working its way through the courts.
But that’s just an issue with states, cities, and police agencies who want to cooperate. The highest concentrations of undocumented immigrants reside in “sanctuary cities,” where city and police leaders either have no interest in enforcing immigration law, are prohibited from doing so by local law, or both. It also seems likely that once Trump’s immigration hunters begin their work, we’ll see more immigrants moving to sanctuary cities. Trump and Miller also want to punish cities and states who don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement by withholding federal funding. That dispute will inevitably be resolved by the federal courts. Until then, it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to compel blue cities and states to use their own resources to hunt down undocumented immigrants.
The more likely scenario here would be for Trump to federally deputize state and local police officers who want to participate, and send National Guard troops from red states into the blue cities in those states. This would mean sending bunch of sheriff’s deputies from, say, rural Texas, into Houston, Austin, or El Paso — or from, say, Indiana into Chicago — with vague orders to detain and arrest anyone who looks “illegal.”
Here’s Miller describing the plan on Charlie Kirk’s podcast:
. . . we saw under President Trump how elated ICE was when, on day one, we said, you can arrest whoever you want to arrest. All the memos, all the restrictions, all the restraints are gone.
Go out, make arrests. No one's going to tell you not to put cuffs on somebody and send them home. Border Patrol was elated when we said, all this asylum, BS ends, it ends now. These fake stories, these fake families, these fake asylum claims, it all stops now. They were ecstatic when that happened, and so they will be equally ecstatic when it comes time to implement the next phase of the plan, God willing, in 2025. Obviously, there's a lot of work that has to be done between now and then, but I want everybody listening to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately, and it will be joyous, and it will be wonderful, and it will be everything you want it to be.
That last line is especially depraved. Opposing undocumented immigration is one thing. Finding joy and glee at armed enforcers pulling people from their homes, cramming them into camps, and dumping them off in countries they barely know is diabolical.
The problem for Miller is that they won’t find enough cops to make this happen, either. Estimates on the number of active duty law enforcement officers in the U.S. vary widely, but at the higher end, it’s around 700,000 sworn officers. This means that without support from the National Guard, Trump would need about 70 percent of current police officers working full time on immigration. Even if he were to somehow muster 100 percent participation from all National Guard troops in red and blue states, he’d still need about another 30 percent of police manpower nationwide. And of course those resources would be diverted from other police work.
It seems likely that the administration would also ask Congress for funding to go on a hiring binge. They wouldn’t get nearly what they’d need to deport 15 million people, but they’d like get a substantial increase, and they’d use it to hire Trump-loyal ICE and Border Patrol agents who are excited at the possibility of pulling families out of their homes and putting them on airplanes. Border Patrol is already by far the most feverishly pro-MAGA police agency in the federal government, and it’s likely that the typical CBP officer would be the archetype for new hires into Trump’s deportation army.
Again, it’s the aspiration that’s chilling: If he were able to hire the number of people he’d actually need, Trump’s deportation force would be larger than any branch of the U.S. military. If it were a military itself, it would be the eighth largest in the world.
But even these figures may be low, because we’re extrapolating from current removal figures, under current removal policy. Again, current U.S. policy prioritizes deporting undocumented people who already determined to be a threat to public safety — people who have been arrested or convicted of crimes, or did something else to put themselves on the radar of immigration officials. It’s usually just a matter of handing them off.
Trump’s plan would require immigration officials, police, National Guardsmen, local cops, and whomever else he assigns to the operation to seek out undocumented immigrants whose only offense is to be undocumented — people already blending in, already assimilating. That sort of operation requires considerably more manpower and resources. “When they have to track down a fugitive, they don’t just send one guy,” Bier says. “They send 4-5 man teams. And that’s what they’d have to do when they start pursuing people who aren’t already in custody.”
There is a darker — and unfortunately I think more likely — scenario in which the cost of Trump’s plan would be quite a bit lower than the figures above. As cruel and inhumane our current immigration system is — and it’s pretty damned cruel and inhumane — it does still have protocols, rules, and procedures. There are still at least some protections for people who come to this country without documentation.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the reporting on Project 2025, it’s that they have no intention of letting laws, rules, or procedures get in their way.
The plan for a Trump II administration is to purge anyone who cares about norms and institutions, even those who otherwise are hardcore conservatives. The only real requirement in the next Donald Trump administration will be loyalty to Donald Trump.
Miller at one point told Kirk, “federal law enforcement has been populated by many people who range from Democrat partisan to wild-eyed left-wing radical.” The notion that federal law enforcement agencies are populated with woke leftists is of course delusional. By “wild-eyed left-wing radical,” Miller means anyone who, for any given order, might prioritize the rule of law over Trump.
Kirk then asked Miller how they plan to get around the “immigration lawyers,” by which he means people at INS and DOJ who insist on abiding by the law. Miller responded:
Well, that's where President Trump has proven so adept. A lot of people don't realize the depth and extent of what was achieved in the first term. By 2020, we completely shut down access to the U.S. asylum system."
Everybody was being expelled without any ability to apply for asylum in the United States. We were able to build that architecture under President Trump's leadership by developing rock-solid legal strategies, agency records, putting the right people and personnel in place.
The goal will be to deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and purge anyone who tries to slow it down. Sticklers for legal restrictions or basic human rights will be quickly dismissed.
If it costs too much or becomes to impractical to house and transport detained immigrants humanely, they’ll do it inhumanely. If it costs too much to afford them basic due process rights, they’ll ignore due process. If the immigration courts are moving too slowly, or if there just aren’t enough of them, they’ll simply go around the courts. After all, once a desperate, impoverished person is deported back to their home country, it’s all but impossible to sue their way back in.
Note that for all the logistical needs Miller mentions in his interview with Kirk — procuring planes from the Pentagon, setting up camps on federal land, deputizing local law enforcement — he doesn’t mention the need to staff up the immigration courts. I doubt it’s because he hasn’t thought about it. It’s because he sees them more as a burden than a necessary part of the deportation process.
As for all the pain, suffering, and death that will inevitably result from this plan, for Miller these aren’t bugs, they’re features. Recall that the entire point child separation — a policy for which Miller was a key architect — was deterrence. The idea was to create scenes of emotional devastation — of migrant children being ripped from the arms of their parents — so other migrants would stay home. It was to impose pain on children and parents. Of course, it also didn’t work. Migrants kept coming, anyway.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a Trump II administration would see overcrowded, unsanitary camps plagued by squalor and diseases like cholera or dyptheria as a plus — as just another deterrent. Trump has already conditioned his supporters to think of undocumented people as vermin. Once you’ve convinced people that migrants are animals, it’s isn’t much of leap to start housing and transporting them as you would sheep or cattle. It’s also a lot cheaper, and would provide plenty of B-roll Trump and right-wing media could use to reinforce their demagogic claims that immigrants are infested with disease.
Miller and other immigration hawks are fond of citing the epithetically named “Operation Wetback” as their model. This was a lawless, militaristic deportation program carried out by the Eisenhower administration that decent people now view as a stain on American history. Under the program, Mexican immigrants were rounded up, stuffed into buses, ships, and planes, and dropped off in remote parts of Mexico, regardless of from which part of the country they’d emigrated. Dozens died in the heat. Others died of disease or abuse during the removal. The operation also ensnared thousands of U.S. citizens and legal residents who happened to be Latino.
The Eisenhower administration claimed to have deported 1.1 million people through the program. Historians have put the real number of deportations closer to 250,000. Much of the remaining 1.1 million had voluntarily returned when the administration cut backroom deals with large employers of immigrants to let them bring Mexican workers back in legally through the Bracero program if they fired those who were here illegally. That won’ be an option this time, because Miller and the Project 2025 coalition also plan to end the only legal way for migrant workers to come here legally.
(Side note: Harlan Carter, Eisenhower’s head of INS who oversaw the deportations, was once convicted of murdering a Mexican boy when he was 17. Carter pled self defense, and the verdict was overturned due to faulty jury instructions. The charge was later dropped. Carter would go on to lead the National Rifle Association.)
In the end, even the notoriously brutal, civil-liberties trampling mass deportation that Miller and other immigration hawks recall so fondly only removed between 2 and 7 percent of the number Trump wants to deport.
(“Ramon Casiano,” by the Drive-By Truckers, a song about Harlan Carter and the man he killed.)
Could they do it?
I think we’ve established that logistics and the laws of physics will prevent Trump from deporting 15 million people. But how much of this could they get away with, and for how long?
The Supreme Court gives the executive branch enormous latitude when it comes to setting and enforcing immigration policy. The court has all but suspended the Fourth Amendment for immigration enforcement within 100 miles of the border, a zone that includes about two-thirds of the U.S. population.
The court has also been deferential to the executive with respect to national security, including when it comes to determining what is and isn’t related to national security. (There’s a reason why Trump and the Republicans keep calling migrants “invaders.”) After the September 11 attacks, the court threw out multiple lawsuits from innocent people detained, beaten, and tortured, and conferred immunity on both the political leaders who issued the orders and the soldiers, CIA officers and others who carried them out.
As for federalizing National Guard troops for immigration purposes in blue states against the wishes of their governors, in his piece for the Atlantic, Brownstein consulted with legal authorities who seem to think the courts probably wouldn’t allow that.
Miller seems aware of this, which is why he told Kirk that the plan would be to send Guard troops from red states into blue states to round up immigrants — “And if you're going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby,” he said.
Brownstein’s piece suggests that the courts would probably frown on this, too. But he also points out that Trump could potentially get around the problem invoking the Insurrection Act and bringing in active duty military, instead. Trump desperately wanted to invoke the law during George Floyd protests. He was thwarted when hiw own defense and national security officials threatened to resign. It seems safe to say that this time Trump will surround himself with people who have no such principles.
As for the legality of other components of Miller’s plan, birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, and I doubt even a court like the Fifth Circuit would have the audacity to claim otherwise. Back in 2017, the Supreme Court thoroughly rebuked the federal government’s attempt to denaturalize someone based on an alleged lie in the application process. That sent a pretty clear message that you need to show outright fraud to strip someone of citizenship.
That said, there’s also the question of whether a Trump II administration would even bother to abide by court rulings. Birthright citizenship, for example, isn’t up for debate. It’s explicitly prescribed in the Constitution. They plan to revoke it anyway, which certainly suggest that they aren’t particularly worried about what the courts may do.
Given Trump’s history of trying to delegitimize every court that defies him, it isn’t difficult to imagine a Trump II administration provoking a constitutional crisis by openly ignoring court rulings. But it wouldn’t even need to come to that. They could do what Trump did the first time around, and what he’s doing now in his personal legal battles: They could start implementing clearly illegal policies and mass violations of civil rights under transparently bullshit legal theories, then just continue doing the illegal stuff while those cases take months or years to work their way through the courts.
The Supreme Court almost always assumes good faith on the part of people in power. So you could just put someone like Jeffrey Clark at the Office of Legal Counsel, and later say you were earnestly relying on the legal opinions of that esteemed office.
The Roberts court also seems to believe that the best way to protect the integrity of the court is to avoid confrontation with the executive. So even if the court eventually hems and haws its way to overturning an illegal policy, you can do a lot of damage in the meantime.
Miller and his cohorts would also have little to fear personally. Again, the post-September 11 decisions largely insulated the politicians who make and implement federal policies from any civil liability. If the architects of Guantanamo and the CIA torture program can’t be sued, it’s hard to envision the court finding room to sue Miller for his cholera camps, or looking the other way while Latino legal residents or U.S. citizens were “mistakenly” deported.
Moreover, after Egbert v. Boule in 2022, individual federal law enforcement officers now essentially have absolute immunity from civil liability, too, even for egregious, clearly intentional constitutional violations. The federal courts have also ruled that local police deputized as federal officers enjoy the same protections. So any Guard reservists, local cops, U.S. troops, or Proud Boys absorbed into Trump’s deportation force would be protected, too.
I don’t think the latter is an exaggeration. Trump has long had a twisted fascination with rogue groups of bikers, cops, and soldiers using violence against his enemies. It’s not at all difficult to see him trying to deputize militia groups and Minutemen types to help with deportations. There’s currently a fairly substantial training and certification process required for deputizing immigration officials, but a Trump administration could try to waive all of that.
So in sum, we’d have a deportation army working for a DHS or DOJ staffed with Trump loyalists who don’t believe in birthright citizenship, don’t believe that even naturalized citizens are “real” citizens, and who, like Trump, believe immigration enforcement officers should be “unleashed” from the constraints that come with respecting the rights of the people they detain. And if they should illegally beat or shoot someone, or mistakenly deport a U.S. citizen or legal resident, Trump’s DOJ won’t prosecute them*, and they can’t be sued. Every incentive nudges them toward cruelty, exuberance, and erring on the side of arrest, and there’s really no disincentive for going too far.
(*The federal courts have thrown out attempts by state prosecutors to criminally charge federal law enforcement officers under state law.)
Finally, on some level the “Could they do it?” question seems irrelevant. This is the most illiberal, openly authoritarian campaign promise from a major presidential candidate in my lifetime. They want to do it. They’re promising to do it. They have a plan in place to do it. To let them try is to put the principles of democracy on black and spin the roulette wheel.
Only there’s no payoff if we’re lucky enough to win. We can really only lose.
The damage
When Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he ambiguously moves between the handful (and disproportionately small) population who commit crimes while they’re here and peaceful undocumented immigrants. But make no mistake. He plans to deport all of them. Here’s what that would mean:
According to the Center for Migration Studies, under Trump’s plan about 5.7 million U.S.-born, U.S. citizen children would lose one or both parents. If just one third of those children remain in the U.S., the public cost of their care would be around $118 billion, though of course if Trump and Miller get their way, those kids would also either be deported or denied access to social safety net programs.
Under the plan, about 3 million undocumented people who were children when they were brought to the U.S. would be deported and dropped off in countries they’ve never known. Tens of thousands of mixed-status families would be plunged into poverty, as the average annual income of households with at least one undocumented family member would drop from $41,000 per year to $23,000. The plan would also put more than 1 million mortgages in jeopardy, likely destabilizing the housing market.
Back in 2017, when Trump said he wanted to deport a mere 8 million immigrants, the center-right think tank American Action Forum (AAF) estimated that the removal itself and border security needed to carry out those removals would cost about half a trillion dollars. If we adjust for inflation and Trump’s new figure of 15 million deportations, we’re looking at just under a trillion dollars. AAF also estimated the 8 million deportations would take 20 years to complete. Trump promises to deport nearly twice that many before he leaves office.
AAF also estimated that the 2017 plan would result in a 6.4 percent reduction in the labor pool, which over 20 years would result in a U.S. economy about 6 percent smaller than it otherwise would be, at a loss of $1.6 trillion.
A more recent calculation of the 15 million deportation plan estimates that GDP would immediately drop by 1.4 percent, and by $4.7 trillion over the next 10 years.
By these estimates, the total cost of Trump’s plan would be about $6 trillion over the next decade. And that isn’t accounting for the lost $1 trillion or so we would have added to the economy if we’d put undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship.
The U.S. economy is built on the backs of undocumented workers. Most economists believe that immigrants saved us from a severe depression and even worse inflation after COVID. If Trump manages even a fraction of his deportation goals, expect to see a more punishing surge in inflation, driven by an increase in the cost of groceries, services like child and elder care, and new home construction. (Trump’s promised 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports would then kick inflation into overdrive.)
Immigration hawks argue that immigrant contributions are offset by the fact that they depress wages. But this just isn’t true. Immigrants actually increase wages by growing the economy. When immigrants returned after COVID, for example, wages increased for the bottom quarter of the workforce, well outpacing inflation.
When Alabama passed its tough immigration bill, cotton fields in the state withered. Georgia’s anti-immigration law wrought a $118 million loss among fruit and vegetable farmers. Texas farmers are struggling because after that state’s tough new immigration law, the 1.6 million undocumented workers there are afraid they’ll run into checkpoints while traveling to find work. The dairy industry estimates that without immigrants, the price of milk would double. Dairy farms in Wisconsin — and for that matter farms all over the country — struggled during the first Trump administration as just the threat of crackdowns, ramped-up state enforcement, and anti-immigrant rhetoric prompted many workers to return to Mexico and Central America. A year after Florida passed its strict anti-immigrant bill, the state’s businesses are struggling with a labor shortage. Farm towns have “turned into ghost towns.” One think tank estimates that the new law cost the state economy $12 billion. There are also current critical labor shortages on farms in Missouri and Kansas.
Beyond the economy, it’s possible that recruiting 30 percent or more of state and local police for immigration enforcement will result in a surge in crime. If you believe that more cops means less crime (a claim that I’ve been skeptical of here), Trump’s plan would require a far more drastic diversion of police resources, spread out over the entire country, than any post-George Floyd reform in any jurisdiction. He’d need at least three of every 10 cops to stop enforcing state and local law, and do nothing but detain undocumented immigrants.
More significantly, it would push a significant percentage of the immigrant population underground, fearful of any interaction at all with law enforcement. We already know that when immigration enforcement ramps up, both legal and undocumented immigrants are less likely to report crime and cooperate with police. It’s bad for public safety. We know because it happened during the first Trump administration.
As Brownstein points out, Miller’s plan to send red state National Guard troops into blue states and blue cities to hunt undocumented immigrants is also a recipe for violence. Would police in sanctuary cities try to protect residents from out-of-state Guardsmen? What if citizens of those states resist to protect their neighbors? Are Guardsmen from Virginia prepared to shoot protesters in Baltimore? Local police would then be in the position of having to choose between intervening on behalf of the out-of-state Guardsmen, or on behalf of the people they’re sworn to protect. Would Democratic governors summon their own states’ own Guardsman to counter the out-of-state troops? What would those confrontations look like?
It seems likely that ICE and Border Patrol agents would carry out Trump’s plan eagerly and temerariously. It’s what they signed up to do. But that isn’t true of National Guard reservists or — should it come to that — members of the U.S. military. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s directive sending National Guard troops to the border (weirdly, at the urging of Tucker Carlson) has been disastrous, with Guard troops hit by low morale and even a string of suicides. One healthy and encouraging thing we saw after the Lafayette Park debacle in 2020 were the subsequent condemnations of the stunt by National Guard troops and officers and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.
“It’s easy to get people behind you when you say you want to deport undocumented people,” Sherman Luna says. “But I hope we’ll start to see resistance once people realize what that really means. It means soldiers and police going door to door, pulling families out of their homes and arresting them. Neighbors, friends, parents of their kids’ friends, people you go to church with — perhaps people you didn’t know were undocumented — will start to disappear.”
If and when that happens, we’ll all be implicated. We can’t reelect a man who proudly tells a nation of immigrants that immigrants are no better than animals, then show surprise when he treats immigrants like animals. We can’t let that president give the power to deport millions to an avowed bigot who wants to rewrite not just the future of immigration in this country, but recast the proudest moments of our past as shame, while taking pride in our most shameful, then feign shock when we he repeats our worst mistakes.
Nearly all of us are descendants of immigrants. How we react to what Trump and Miller are promising will speak volumes about who we are and how we see ourselves. Will we see the kids — the kids they want to pry from the arms of parents and stash in an abandoned warehouse or crumbling shopping mall under armed guard — as our own kids, or as someone else’s? When they rouse parents and grandparents from their homes at gunpoint, herd them onto military planes, fly them to the border, then pen them behind barbed wire, outdoors, in 110-degree heat, will we see that as an assault on our own parents, grandparents, and ancestors, or just someone else’s problem?
We can’t allow these things to happen, then later pretend that we didn’t know. Because they’ve told us exactly what they want to do. There will be no surprises here.
In his interview with Kirk, Miller compared the scope of his immigration plan to the construction of the Panama Canal, and its ruthlessness to Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
He couldn’t be any clearer about what he intends.
(Thanks to the Tennessee Immigration and Refugee Rights Coalition, American Action Forum, the Cato Institute, the Center for Migration Studies, the Niskanen Center, and the Detention Watch Center for their research and assistance.)
Stephen Miller would have been right at home in the Waffen SS. Every time I see him I visualize him in an SS uniform. He would have been Hitlers right hand man too.
First of all, thanks for your article. It is something I’ve been stressing about for a while and it feels like there has been little talk about it in the liberal community. It feels like people just don’t get the scope of what is being planned. We are talking about more than 6 times the population of Gaza being forcibly removed. More than half have been here for 10 years or more with more than 30% living here more than 15 years. They have homes and families. What Trump is planning is monstrous. Anybody who does not vote for Biden is voting for Stephen Miller’s plan to turn this country into Nazi Germany.