Former President Trump has promised that, if re-elected, he will expel millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally.
Trump and his surrogates have offered few details about how he would carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history,” but they have cemented the goal as a top priority. What is known: The strategy would rely on military troops, friendly state and local law enforcement and wartime powers.
“No one is off the table,” said Tom Homan, Trump’s former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. he said in July. “If you're in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said the administration would start by deporting immigrants. who have committed crimes.
At a campaign rally earlier this month in Aurora, Colorado, Trump said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 “to attack and dismantle all criminal immigrant networks operating on American soil.”
The former president went on to say that he would send “elite squads” of federal law enforcement agents to “hunt down, arrest and deport” all immigrant gang members. Those who attempt to return to the United States would be sentenced to ten years in prison without parole, he said, adding that any migrant who kills a U.S. citizen or law enforcement officer would face the death penalty.
How many people would Trump go after?
It is not clear.
In May, Trump told Time magazine that he would target 15 to 20 million people who he said are living in the U.S. illegally. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center estimates the current number is about 11 million to starting in 2022. More than 2 million people have since entered the country illegally.
“Let's start with 1 million,” Vance told ABC News in August.
Over his entire presidency, from January 2017 to January 2021, Trump deported about 1.5 million immigrants, according to a Migration Policy Institute Analysis of federal figures (far fewer than the 2 million to 3 million he speculated about). deportation in a 2016 interview as president-elect. The Biden administration is on track to match Trump's deportation numbers.
What powers would Trump invoke to justify deportations?
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the United States during times of war. Congress passed the law as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws that tightened restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limited criticism of the government, when the country was on the brink of war with France.
The law has been used three times in American history: during the War of 1812 and World War I and after the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
During World War I, federal authorities placed 6,300 “enemy aliens” (many of them from Germany) in internment camps.
By the end of World War II, more than 31,000 people from Japan, Germany, and Italy, as well as some Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, had been interned in camps and military facilities, in addition to the more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly relocated to the same camps and detained under different legal grounds, said Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a UC Davis professor who studies criminal and immigration law.
Chin said he is not convinced that Trump will make the Alien Enemies Act the cornerstone of his immigration policy because the United States is not in a declared war with another nation.
“It would have to be based on the argument that random immigration – that is, immigration based on individual decisions by individual people – is the equivalent of an invasion of a nation-state,” he said. “And that would have to be based on the concept that foreigners as a group are a nation.”
Trump has also said he would deploy National Guard troops under understanding governors.
“If I thought things were getting out of hand, I would have no problem turning to the military,” he told Time.
Federal law limits the involvement of military troops in civilian law enforcement.
In 2018, Trump sent 5,800 active-duty troops to the southwest border amid the arrival of a caravan of thousands of migrants from Central America. Initially, the troops performed support work, such as laying barbed wire as a deterrent to crossing, but the White House later expanded their authority to allow them to use force and provide crowd management to protect border agents.
Last year, President Biden sent 1,500 Army and Marine Corps troops to fill critical “capability gaps” at the border when the administration lifted the Title 42 border expulsions policy that Trump had invoked to reject applicants for asylum and other possible immigrants like COVID. -19 pandemic wreaked havoc.
Trump has promised to go further during a second term by withdrawing many foreign troops stationed on the US-Mexico border. He has also explored using troops to help with deportations and address civil unrest.
Is it legal?
Using the Alien Enemies Act, Trump could carry out quick deportations without the legal processes typically required. It could also circumvent federal law and use military troops in a broader law enforcement capacity to carry out arrests and deportations.
But speeding up the deportation process could have catastrophic consequences, Chin said. Dozens of American citizens are already being deported by mistake.
“If the goal of this was a raid, American citizens would be detained,” he said.
Katherine Yon Ebright, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, argued in an analysis of the law that courts would likely avoid weighing in on the presence or absence of an invasion, or whether the perpetrator of the alleged invasion is a foreign nation or government.
“The courts' hesitation to weigh in on these issues increases the risk that Trump will invoke the Alien Enemies Act despite its clear inapplicability,” he wrote. But he added that “courts can strike down an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act under modern due process and equal protection law, justiciable grounds for reining in abusive presidential action.”
Tom Jawetz, deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security from 2021 to 2022, said courts tend to give deference to the president in executive determinations. But he said this one could be difficult to maintain.
“There could be opportunities for a legal attack,” he said. “It seems like they are stretching it beyond its capacity, beyond what the text says. [of the law] I would allow it.”
Is it feasible?
Deporting millions of people would be costly and logistically complex.
Former President Obama, who in 2013 oversaw the largest number of deportations in a year in which his administration expelled 438,000 immigrants, relied on local police to turn people over to federal immigration agents. Trump has said he would also trust state and local authorities. But since then many state and local governments, including California, have limited their cooperation with immigration agents.
Immigration courts are already overwhelmed and more deportation cases would add to the backlog of cases. 3.7 million cases. Long delays in immigration court proceedings mean that immigrants often wait years before their case is completed.
Among the rights granted to immigrants is a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that prohibits them from being detained indefinitely if their country does not accept them back. Countries such as Venezuela and China have previously refused to cooperate with US authorities on deportations.
How much would it cost?
It would cost at least $315 billion to deport the roughly 13 million people who are in the country illegally, according to one study. analysis from the American Immigration Council, a group that advocates for policies that welcome immigrants. The deportation effort would require the construction of hundreds of new detention centers, as well as the hiring of hundreds of thousands of new immigration agents, judges and other staff.
Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget was about $9 billion. Significantly increasing its funding would require congressional support, an uphill battle given current political divisions.
Jawetz said Trump could redirect funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense, as he did for the construction of the border wall, and could also reallocate staff from other agencies to carry out immigration management tasks.
A CBS News analysis found that it cost an estimated average of $19,599 to deport a person over the past five fiscal years after accounting for apprehension, detention, immigration court proceedings and transportation out of the U.S. The average cost of repatriation only increases as more migrants arrive from distant countries like Cameroon and China.
How are people preparing?
Mass deportation could tear apart deep-rooted families that include citizens and noncitizens, worsen labor shortages, and cause economic disruption. The mere discussion of mass deportation would also sow fear in immigrant communities, as occurred during Trump's first term.
Jawetz said immigrant advocates are beginning to consider possible legal action. During the Trump presidency, informal Sign and WhatsApp networks emerged across the country in which advocates and community members communicated real-time responses to the policy changes they were seeing on the ground.
“We hope and expect to see a lot of the same this time” if Trump wins, the former National Security adviser said. “If you think about it, the level of anxiety that people feel [would be] “To live like that day to day over a period of years is quite extraordinary.”