What Mass Deportation Under Trump Could Look Like

What Mass Deportation Under Trump Look Like

If he wins a second term in November, Donald Trump has pledged to embark on the biggest deportation program in U.S. history on his first day back in office.

It could mean that a second Trump administration deploys the National Guard—and even the military—and builds huge detention camps along the U.S.-Mexico border to achieve Trump's goal of expelling the millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status.

With immigration being a top issue for voters, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has made cracking down on immigration the centerpiece of his re-election campaign against President Joe Biden. The former president has also vowed to end birthright citizenship and spoken of reviving his 2017 travel ban that originally targeted several Muslim-majority countries.

Trump's vision has been laid out in rally speeches, interviews, and social media posts.

In an interview with Time magazine, he spoke of the speed at which he would seek to deport 15 to 20 million people living in the U.S. illegally. The number of undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. is not clear, but was reported to be around 10.5 million in 2021 by the Pew Research Center.

Trump said he would use National Guard troops to arrest people but did not rule out deploying the military if needed. "I think the National Guard would be able to do that. If they weren't able to, then I'd use the military," he said.

When told that the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the deployment of the military against civilians, Trump replied: "Well, these aren't civilians. These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country." Trump has repeatedly been accused of using dehumanizing language when speaking about migrants, saying they are "poisoning the blood of our country"—a comment that drew criticism for echoing Adolf Hitler—and calling those suspected of committing crimes "animals."

Trump has suggested that he would deputize local police officers to identify targets and make arrests, and said that they would be granted "immunity."

In the Time interview, Trump didn't rule out building new detention camps to process people for deportation but suggested they would not be needed. "I would not rule out anything," he said. "But there wouldn't be that much of a need for them, because of the fact that we're going to be moving them out. We're going to bring them back from where they came."

'Corrosive to the American Way of Life'

Immigration experts fear that U.S. citizens could be wrongfully deported if Trump's plans become a reality.

The deportation plans "would increase the alarming number of U.S. citizens and legal residents now wrongfully deported," Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University and the founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic, told Newsweek.

"Any effort to mass deport noncitizens is on its face a defiance to the rule of law far more corrosive to the American way of life and costly to our economy than residence within the United States of those who entered without permission."

Experts have also expressed concerns about family separations. Thousands of families were separated under a "zero-tolerance" policy on illegal immigration during the Trump administration.

"Trump's mass deportation plan is illegal and horrific," Elora Mukherjee, a law professor and director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School in New York City, told Newsweek. "It sweeps everyone from babies through the elderly into deportation proceedings, without any meaningful consideration of humanitarian concerns or family separations."

Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign for comment via email.

Impact on U.S. Economy

Recent polling found a majority of registered voters—including a majority of Hispanics—favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

Experts say this is because many do not comprehend the practical effects of such a program. "To the extent that such a policy elicits public support, this is due to misleading optics that pit poor communities against each other," Stevens said.

Mukherjee added: "Our national economy—from agricultural fields to the meat supply chain, to the restaurant industry, to childcare providers and gardeners—depends heavily on immigrant labor. America's economy risks devastating effects from a rapid mass deportation program, and such action would be an intolerable moral stain on our national conscience."

Trump's plans would lead to more racial profiling and an increase in raids conducted by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, according to Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K.

Project 2025, led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, has outlined dozens of proposed actions on immigration in a nearly 1,000-page handbook that lays out policies and proposals for the next Republican administration. It calls for ICE officers to be allowed to carry out "civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate."

The Trump campaign has said outside groups do not speak for Trump. Project 2025's proposal was crafted with the help of several former Trump administration officials who could be part of a possible second Trump administration.

Stephen Miller, a Trump adviser who was behind the former president's most hard-line immigration policies, told The New York Times last year that a second Trump administration would see ICE carry out raids in the workplace and in other public places to arrest more undocumented immigrants at once.

Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the country's leading civil rights organizations, published a memo saying it was planning legal action in the event that Trump wins in November and begins mass deportations.

"Trump's deportation dystopia, if realized despite all of the legal, practical, and moral barriers, would fundamentally reshape American life," the ACLU wrote in its memo.

"People across the country would experience armed military personnel, federal agents of all stripes, state and local police, and potentially even police from other states conducting raids and sweeps in their neighborhoods and at their workplaces. People of all immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, could be investigated, questioned, and even arrested by these agents if they are at a location that the deportation force decides to 'hit.'"

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