Mass Deportations
US President-elect Donald Trump has doubled down on his campaign promise of the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, saying he plans to declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out his plan.
The cost of doing so will not be a deterrent, Trump said, noting his priority upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful”.
“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not – really, we have no choice,” Trump told NBC News earlier this month.
The latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security and Pew Research indicate that there are around 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US, a number that has remained relatively stable since 2005.
Most are long-term residents – nearly four-fifths have been in the country for more than a decade.
Immigrants who are in the country without legal status have the right to due process, including a court hearing before their removal. A drastic increase in deportations would likely entail a large expansion in the immigration court system, which has been beset by backlogs.
Most immigrants already in the country enter into the deportation system not through encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents but through local law enforcement.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, said that cooperation between Ice and local officials would be a “critical” aspect of any mass deportation program.
Any mass deportation program is also likely to be almost immediately met with a flurry of legal challenges from immigration and human rights activists.
A 2022 Supreme Court ruling, however, means that courts cannot issue injunctions on immigration enforcement policies – meaning they would continue even as the challenges work their way through the legal system.
Deportations of people arrested in the US interior – as opposed to those at the border – have hovered at below 100,000 for a decade, after peaking at over 230,000 during the early years of the Obama administration.
“To raise that, in a single year, up to a million would require a massive infusion of resources that likely don’t exist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the BBC.
For one, experts are doubtful that Ice’s 20,000 agents and support personnel would be enough to find and track down even a fraction of the figures being touted by the Trump campaign.
Mr Reichlin-Melnick added that the deportation process is long and complicated and only begins with the identification and arrest of an undocumented migrant.
After that, detainees would need to be housed or placed on an “alternative to detention” program before they are brought before an immigration judge, in a system with a years-long backlog.
Only then are detainees removed from the US, a process that requires diplomatic cooperation from the receiving country.
“In each of those areas, Ice simply does not have the capacity to process millions of people,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said.
Trump has said he would involve the National Guard or other US military forces to help with deportations.
Experts estimate that the total bill for one million or more deportations would run into tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Ice budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420m (£327m). In that year the agency deported slightly more than 140,000 people.
Thousands of immigrants would be detained while awaiting court hearings or deportations, and the Trump campaign has envisioned building large encampments to house them all.
The number of removal flights would also need to be dramatically expanded, possibly requiring military aircraft to augment current capacity.
Just a small expansion in any of these areas could result in significant costs.
“Even a minor change is in the tens of millions, or hundreds of millions,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said. “A significant change is in the tens or hundreds of millions.”
Those costs would be in addition to the expense of other border enforcement efforts that Trump has promised: continuing work on a southern US border wall, a naval blockade to prevent fentanyl from entering the country, and moving thousands of troops to the border.
The only historical comparison to a mass deportation program came in 1954, when as many as 1.3 million people were deported as part of Operation Wetback, named after a derogatory slur then commonly used against Mexican people.
That figure is disputed by historians, however.
The programme, under President Dwight Eisenhower, ran into considerable public opposition – partly because some US citizens were also deported – as well as a lack of funding. It was largely discontinued by 1955.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topics
ACTION: Contact your members of Congress to express your support or opposition to Mass Deportations and the cost they would incur.