A Reelected Trump Will Unleash Unspeakable Cruelty Toward Immigrants

His first-term crackdown is child’s play compared to his second term plans

Shutterstock. David Peinado Romero

It is fair to say that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly by whipping up anti-immigration hysteria. So it is hardly surprising that his campaign is dusting off the same playbook for 2024. Trump has already promised to round up asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants in what his hardline anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, promises would be “the most spectacular migration crackdown” in the nation’s history. Indeed, Trump and Miller want to scale-up by a factor of 10 the insultingly named Eisenhower era program, Operation Wetback. That program, considered a dark chapter in American history, swept up migrants in the Southwest who’d come to pick crops after World War II and deported them en masse.

Trump’s dreams would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and, even more importantly, constitute a gross violation of human rights. To understand what is at stake, some facts and history are in order.

Manufacturing a Crisis

When Donald Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, illegal border crossings were actually at a 50-year low. That year, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended only about 337,000 migrants, marking a steady decline since 2000 when apprehensions had peaked at almost 1.7 million. But that didn’t stop Trump from deploying racist tropes to depict a crisis on the border. Mexico, he accused, was not “sending their best” to the U.S. “They're sending people that have lots of problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”

He promised to build a wall, delusionally asserting Mexico would pay for it. But that, ironically, only accelerated a flow of migrants hoping to enter before its construction. Analyzing historical data, it is clear that during the 2016 campaign, illegal border apprehensions increased by almost 25% and by fiscal year 2019, they had surged by more than 150%.  The pandemic and Trump’s implementation of emergency health measures such as Title 42 that returned migrants and would-be asylum seekers to Mexico without a hearing to which they were legally entitled brought the numbers down again in 2020.

The economic rebound that followed the end of the pandemic spurred a flood of new migration to the southern border—and not just from Mexico and Central America but from around the world. Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans fled political repression and collapsed economies; Haitians fled natural disasters and corruption that crippled the island. But others showed up by the thousands as well, including Afghans who had not made it out during the U.S. withdrawal, Ukrainians and Russians fleeing war, Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese desperate to escape poverty, violence, and discrimination in their homelands. Our outdated immigration laws make it nearly impossible for immigrants who lack advanced degrees or close relatives in the U.S. to immigrate legally. As a result, many take their chances crossing our southern border without permission in the hopes they will evade detection.

But many of those who’ve come in the last two years have taken advantage of current asylum laws by turning themselves in when they cross the border. Under existing law, individuals may claim asylum only when they are present in the U.S., regardless of how they got here, and may even do so when they are already in the removal process.  

The Biden administration tried to modify the process by issuing regulations that would prevent individuals from claiming asylum at the southern border or in certain coastal areas unless they had first availed themselves of legal pathways to migrate or sought protection in a third country if they had traversed it on their way to the U.S.

Our Broken Immigration System

Meanwhile, the existing backlog of cases pending in immigration courts stands at nearly three million. But when courts can’t hear asylum cases in a timely manner, they have to release the migrants till their hearing is scheduled. This generates an incentive for migrants to simply to show up at the border, claim they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries and take their chances that they will be quickly released into the population to wait years before they must appear in court to defend their claims.

This, along with other push and pull factors, has resulted in, 2.4 million newcomers arriving in fiscal year 2023— numbers not seen since the early 20^th Century, before the advent of broadscale American immigration restriction. Of course, the better solution would be to hire more immigration judges and process claims faster, and, most importantly, admit more legal immigrants. By one estimate we need at least 370,000 more immigrants than the approximately one million to whom we hand resident status annually just to offset the effects of an aging population. But Republicans want only to clamp down on immigration. Pre-Trump they at least used to say that they liked legal immigrants. Now they don’t want them either.

The result is a system that is broken, with politicians refusing to fix it, and a sense of chaos at the southern border. Predictably, a backlash has ensued. Republican leaders sensing that this is a political winner for them are rearing for a fight with the Biden administration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot just yesterday signed a new bill that allows state authorities to arrest unauthorized migrants. Given that immigration enforcement is a federal function, he is deliberately baiting the administration into suing his illegal plans and scoring political points.

Political Backlash = Trump’s Opportunity

But it’s not just MAGA states that are spooked. Democratic mayors from El Paso to New York to Chicago have complained that they simply cannot handle the unregulated flow of asylum seekers who end up in their cities.  Both Trump’s Republican backers and his Democratic critics—such as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira who blame immigration for alienating working class voters (even though there is precious little academic literature for such worries)—believe that this issue may once again put him in the Oval Office.

But once Trump returns in 2025, he is virtually guaranteeing an assault on every category of immigration. He will try and stop the flow of all asylum seekers. He will also try to drastically reduce, even totally slam shut, other channels for legal immigration, a radical move that he promised last time around but couldn’t fully implement.

Among the other channels he’ll close are the Temporary Protected Status program that 610,000 foreign nationals fleeing countries mired in war, natural disaster, or facing some other extraordinary circumstance are availing. He would also end humanitarian parole that the Biden administration has used to permit Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians to apply for entry from outside the U.S. so that they can be processed in an orderly fashion rather than showing up at the border to claim asylum. The program also saw a big drop in the number of migrants from these countries attempting to cross without permission. (Parole also ensures U.S. sponsors assume financial responsibility for parolees.) This was the primary vehicle that allowed 70,000 Afghans to come to the U.S. after being evacuated following the 2021 fall of Kabul, as well as admitting Ukrainians while the war with Russia rages in their country. MAGA forces in Congress have thwarted legislation to give these groups more permanent status, which will leave them vulnerable.

Trump would also, once again, end protections for Dreamers, young adults brought to the U.S. as children who’ve been given temporary legal status to live and work here. The Supreme Court stopped Trump’s previous attempt to revoke Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, largely on procedural grounds, but subsequently courts have ruled DACA is invalid unless Congress enacts the protections into law, leaving some 600,000 current participants subject to future deportation.

Some immigrants stripped of permission to live in the U.S. will leave on their own. But the vast majority who have put down roots here won’t. In all, Trump would attempt to remove some 12 million people, two-thirds of whom have lived here for a decade or more, often in households that include American spouses and children.

Cracking Down on the Huddled Masses

What would Trump’s plan to remove them look like in practice? According to extensive reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere, the Trump’s campaign envisions large scale raids across the country conducted by federal immigration enforcement agencies, supplemented by National Guard troops from Republican-controlled states. (Texas’ Abbot would go to town!) Detainees would be herded in tent encampments along the southern border—to be built with re-programmed military funds to avoid having to obtain Congressional approval or submitting to oversight—pending their deportation. Indeed, current negotiations over supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel, include proposals to expand expedited removal of unauthorized immigrants without hearings before immigration courts. Under the proposals being discussed, expedited removal would set up the legal framework for Trump’s planned sweep.

These are the exact same methods used in “Operation Wetback” except on a much, much larger scale. That program removed an estimated 250,000 to 1.5 million people—even though thousands returned­ to Mexico before being apprehended as a media frenzy ensued. But the program resulted in many deaths, including 88 Mexicans who died from heat exposure while being detained.

Economic Devastation

Unauthorized immigrants reside heavily in just six states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, and, as of 2021, they constituted  almost 5% of the workforce nationally.  It is difficult to imagine the pain and disruption that Trump’s deportation scheme would unleash on immigrant communities across the country. Imagine small towns in, say, Texas, home to some 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants,  two-thirds of whom are employed adults and 37% are home owners. Whole communities would be routed, adults rounded up and sent to camps, their minor children, many of them citizens, put in state care, their employers left without workers.

Most of these unauthorized immigrants pay income and payroll taxes and all pay real estate and sales taxes as homeowners or renters and consumers. A mass deportation scheme would hollow out communities, leaving vacant houses and abandoned businesses as well as destroying individual lives and families. Donald Trump may relish the suffering of those he claims are “poisoning the blood of our country,” but most Americans would be horrified to see such a plan in action.

It's tempting to dismiss Trump’s rhetoric and to believe mass deportation on this scale and this level of cruelty in this land of immigrants. But the first Trump term already gave us a taste of what could happen.

We ignore what Trump says he intends to do at our own peril. Trump’s admiration for the likes of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping tells us something about his desire to assume authoritarian power—and he’ll use it “on Day One” to shut the border, as he told Sean Hannity during a recent interview.

But it’s the days after we most have to worry about.   

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