In The Washington Post today, reporters Isaac Arsdorf, Nick Miroff, and Josh Dawsey detail how Donald Trump and his allies are planning a solution to undocumented migrants in the United States. Trump is planning on a day-one-dictatorship where he will, of course, break the law and use the military to carry out mass deportations, close the U.S.-Mexico border, and build deportation / concentration camps for people caught up in his racist roundups.
Trump promises to:
- Sign an executive order to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from citizens (children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States)
- Institute the largest deportation operation in American history
- Deploy national guard troops from Republican-governed states to Democratic-governed states
- Conduct large scale roundups using National Guard troops, state police, and federal law enforcement officers as “force multipliers” for ICE officers
- Order predawn raids targeting families and then separated children from their parents or guardians
- Detain migrants on military bases and fly them out of the country on military planes
- Deploy troops to the southern border to “catch” people crossing
- Use military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers
- Close and block the border using the military
- Deploy the military for domestic law enforcement
- Transport migrants in dangerous conditions that will lead to some deaths
- Build mass deportation / concentration camps
Unlike in his first time in the White House, Trump and his allies “would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term… Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.”
As we have witnessed already, Trump is already grooming his followers to accept the oncoming horrors about to be inflicted on migrants. Trump has “escalated his use of dehumanizing language to describe migrants, accusing them of ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and calling the record unauthorized border crossings an ‘invasion’”.
“Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state,” Genevieve Nadeau, a former DHS lawyer, said in a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy. “He’s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.”
Trump is in close touch with his former adviser, Stephen Miller, who his campaign views as a leading authority on white supremacy immigration policy.
Miller has concluded that in a second Trump administration “aggressive immigration enforcement” must “be implemented as quickly as possible” so they can break the law faster than the courts can keep up.
“You’re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?” said Jason Houser, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of stafffrom January 2022 until March 2023. “Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That’s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.”
Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, “Their ideas were psychotic.”
Just how many people will be impacted? Even if U.S. citizens are not swept into detention camps and deported…
The pool of potential deportees is large. There are about 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status, according to the most recent estimates. Nearly 7 million of those are known to ICE, which maintains a vast database of people eligible for deportation whose asylum claims and immigration cases are still pending.
Countries of origin for migrants have limited or refused to take back deportees. Trump and his administration officials will quickly run out of space and destinations for people rounded up by federal forces. Then what?
Trump surrogates say migrants would be put in “camps” or “tents.” And of course, Trump and his associates have no plans to address humanitarian and legal requirements for health care, child care, or safety of the people he detains.
As the number of people in ICE custody jumped 22 percent in Trump’s first two years, the DHSinspector general uncovered“egregious violations of detention standards,” including inadequate medical care, expired food, lack of recreation, moldy bathrooms and inadequate clothing and hygiene supplies. A separate inspector general’s investigation found “dangerous overcrowding” in an El Paso facility, where a cell built for 25 people held 155.
In June 2018, reporters and human rights activists toured a facility in McAllen, Tex., where children slept under foil sheets surrounded by chain-link fencing, after DHS acknowledged separating children from their parents at the border. Public outrage over an audio clip of a sobbing child forced Trump to halt the practice. DHS later identified 4,227separated children, 3,147 of whom were reunited with their parent as ofNovember 2023.
How long Trump before orders the overcrowded camps emptied by any means?