We Don't Talk Enough About Trump's Insane Mass Deportation Plan!

Immigration, immigration, deport, deport!

Trump has been married to two immigrants, his mother was an immigrant, and he’s used undocumented workers for decades to build his buildings, make his bed, and scrub the orange stains from his collars. The fucking audacity of this man, being out here drooling over how he wants mass deportations of America’s 13.3 million undocumented workers! And his little toadies like Stephen Miller would sure like to deport the legal immigrants too. “A demonstration of why the immigration discussion cannot simply be cleaved into legal/illegal,” he sharted on Twitter early this year. “Refugee resettlement is ‘legal.’ Chain migration is ‘legal.’ Diversity lottery is ‘legal.’ Islamist green card migration is ‘legal.’ And it’s why we need the Trump Travel Ban back now.”

Hey, don’t take it personally, immigrants! It’s just a page from the authoritarian handbook used by everybody from Adolph to Zedong, you gotta demonize somebody so that the big strong strongman has some boogey-person that only he will protect you from. Never mind that immigrants are far less likely to be arrested for crimes and are actually keeping the economy afloat, putting way more into it than they are taking out. Facts are so inconvenient! 

But how will he do it, does he even have a plan for this? Thursday in Albuquerque he vowed to use the Peter Griffin-meme standard for deportations.

“There’s people pouring in and they can look at ‘em and they can see trouble. They go trouble trouble trouble, trouble, no trouble, trouble trouble, they can look at em and they can see good or bad…”

Trump’s is a program with very few details, just a lot of florid lies about what American immigrants have been up to, like eating Garfield and Huey, Louie and Dewey, and gangs taking over the city of Aurora, and so on.

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Funny how for every single policy Kamala Harris has, reporters have quizzed her on specifics of how they would work, and demanded to know how she’d pay for it, but Trump and Vance barely get those questions, much less try to answer them. Who would carry out these mass deportations? How much would it cost? What would it do to the economy? Do Americans really want to see children and abuelas pulled out of their beds in the middle of the night in an “Operation Wetback” 2.0 times 100, with a side of Japanese-American internment camp? Are they really craving to carve up sides of beef in slaughterhouses, pick grapes, and scrub skidmarks off of their wealthier compatriots’ underpants?

The American Immigration Council has tried to put some numbers to Trump’s extreme, fakakta proposals. Though it’s tough because no one can even agree on how many people lacking permanent legal status even exist. Trump says 18 million, the government estimates about 11 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says foreign-born workers of all immigration status accounted for 18.6 percent of the total US civilian labor force in 2023. That’s a lot of people to lose! And estimates say 79 percent of them have been here for 15 years or more.

Even deporting one million people a year would require ICE to work at 24 times more capacity than it currently has, and take 1,000 more immigration courtrooms than currently exist. AIC estimates all of this would conservatively cost $88 billion a year, not even including the cost of building the detention camps Stephen Miller has been fantasizing about. 

And then there’s the loss of tax revenue: Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $70 billion in local, state, and federal taxes in 2022, even as they’re ineligible for programs like Social Security and Medicare. Researchers say that without them annual US GDP could drop by as much as 6.8 percent. Florida would lose 5 percent of its population, about a million people. About 14 percent of workers in the construction industry are undocumented, immigrants are about 16 percent of all nurses, and about one-third of the workers providing care to the elderly and disabled.

But mass deportation could be a boon to private contractors! Various companies like detention center operators GEO Group and CoreCivic, and MVM Inc., which buses immigrants between detention sites, and CSI Aviation Services, supplying planes to fly immigrants to their home countries, already make about $1 billion a year from contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the US Marshals Service. And there’s immigrant monitoring — before the Biden administration canceled their contract in 2022 — Acuity International, previously known as Caliburn International, which had a five-year $72 million contract to detain children in “prison like” conditions that were not subject to state inspections. 

Is the plan for all of those high-school educated native-born men to let fruit rot on the vine, free all of the farm animals, make grandma wash her own bedpan, and work on plucking, corralling, and deporting immigrants instead? Franklin, West Virginia, tried something like that. It’s not going great. For right-wing conspiracy theorists who think there’s some kind of agenda to force everybody into eating bugs, it would be the very fastest way to make it actually happen. Termite sandwiches for everyone!

[Time Magazine/ New York Times gift link Wall Street Journal Stephen Miller gift link/ American Immigration Council/ Miami Herald archive link/ NPR/ CBS News/ Wall Street Journal Franklin, WVa gift link]