Obama set the bar high for deportations.
If Trump requires all illegals to register with their address and contact info and they don't...he can legally deport folks who don't comply.
The American people elected the Dark lord on two main issues: A. Illegal immigration and the high cost of "stuff" since the pandemic. Not sure the NY Times understands this?
Trump's deportation plans
By German Lopez, NY Times
Nov 27, 2024
Good morning. We’re covering Donald Trump’s deportation plans, as well as the Israel-Lebanon cease-fire, assisted dying and 100 notable books of 2024.
Pushing people out
Imagine the population of Chicago. Then quadruple it. That’s about how many unauthorized immigrants Donald Trump hopes to remove from the country: 11 million people in all.
It won’t be easy. How will the government find all of these people? Where will they be held as officials process their cases? Will migrants’ home countries take them back? And will lawmakers approve all the funding required for this?
The Morning is running a series on the policies that Trump and his congressional allies will try to implement next year. Today’s installment will look at his mass deportation goals.
A huge operation
We already know the broad contours of Trump’s plan. He wants to use the military and law enforcement to detain the millions of people who are in the United States illegally. The government will hold them in detention facilities while it inspects the facts of each case. Finally, it will fly undocumented migrants to their home countries or other places that agree to take them.
We know less about more specific details. Here are six lingering questions:
1. Who are the targets? Trump aides say they will prioritize migrants with criminal records and previous removal orders, who number in the hundreds of thousands. The federal government already knows where to find most of these people, thanks to their previous contact with law enforcement, and can quickly deport many.
The question is who comes next. Trump also wants to deport undocumented migrants with clean records (aside from the blemish of breaking the law to enter the United States). And he has said he’ll go after people with Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows some migrants from specific countries to stay in the United States legally. These migrants could be harder to find and detain, especially in cities and states that call themselves sanctuaries for the undocumented. Those places have refused to cooperate with most federal deportation efforts.
2. Will courts sign off? Undocumented migrants have due process rights, so their cases typically have to work through the courts. But immigration courts have yearslong backlogs. Trump officials want to use arcane laws, like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to bypass this process. That will likely lead to lawsuits — similar to those that stifled Trump’s first-term immigration policies.
Trump has two advantages. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, are friendlier to conservatives than they were in his first term. The Supreme Court has also ruled that the president has broad powers over immigration.
3. Where will migrants be held? Right now, officials don’t have anywhere to put tens of thousands more migrants, let alone hundreds of thousands. The government will have to build, buy or lease more detention centers.
4. Will other nations cooperate? Some countries, such as Venezuela, don’t take deportation flights from the United States. Others might resist taking in a sudden surge of migrants, especially those with criminal records. The administration could persuade nations to cooperate with a mix of favors and threats — trade deals and tariffs — but that would require careful diplomacy.
5. Will Congress pay up? Trump’s plan will cost $88 billion a year, the American Immigration Council estimates. That’s nearly twice the budget of the National Institutes of Health and four times NASA’s budget. Trump has suggested he’ll declare an emergency to use military funds for deportations. But the plan is expensive enough that Congress will likely have to approve more spending for it, and a bill might require Democratic support to pass the Senate.
6. Will immigrants self-deport? A goal of mass deportations is to create a climate of fear among migrants, leading some to leave America on their own. We don’t know how many people will do this.
Given these hurdles, Trump might not sustain the millions of deportations a year he wants. Still, he’ll almost certainly succeed in deporting more people than President Biden did. After all, the country has done it before, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:
The Bush and Obama administrations managed to remove 400,000 people a year at their peaks. Biden has deported fewer than 200,000 most years.
The consequences
Trump and his allies say that their plan will revitalize the economy and prioritize the rule of law. American workers “will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top immigration advisers, told The Times last year.
Critics say that mass deportations will cause chaos in Latino communities, as well as labor shortages in industries like agriculture, food processing and construction, leading to higher prices. They also question if the cost of mass deportations is worth it. For the same price as deporting every undocumented migrant, the American Immigration Council estimated, the United States could build almost three million homes.
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