Trump Isn't Just After Undocumented Immigrants—He Wants 100 Million Americans Purged, Too
Thankfully the Supreme Court is unlikely to scrap birthright citizenship, because that would open the door to mass ethnic cleansing
The Supreme Court will soon rule in a case that will decide the future of birthright citizenship. The case has become more significant than ever because some officials are now openly advocating for ethnic cleansing—mass removals of tens of millions of U.S.-born Americans based on their ancestry.
In barely a year, the right has moved from the already controversial mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants to mass deportation of Americans. The 14th Amendment, drafted in part to prevent ethnic cleansing, should stop it. Whether it will is now up to the Supreme Court.
The ‘100 Million’ Fantasy
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiated this shift in December when its social media account posted an image of a sunny beach with the caption: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world: America after 100 million deportations.” Deportations based on what? Not on legal status but on ancestry in the “third world.”
The Pew Research Center, using Census Bureau data, has estimated that there are 52 million immigrants in America, and 24 million are naturalized U.S. citizens. Only 14 million are in the country illegally.
In other words, DHS is openly advocating for the deportations of tens of millions of citizens, including almost 50 million U.S.-born citizens. This is not an aberration. Greg Bovino, the recently retired Border Patrol chief, told The New York Times in March that while leading Border Patrol’s interior operations, he drafted “a plan to deport 100 million people.”
Bovino repeatedly reiterated his call for 100 million deportations at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that month as well, and has used it almost daily on social media since then. Lest one think Bovino’s statements are no longer relevant given that he was booted out after ICE’s thuggery in Minneapolis, note that GOP political candidates at CPAC echoed him. South Carolina Senate candidate Paul Dans said: “after he heard I was committed to 100 million deportations, [Bovino] endorsed me.”
A candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (which handles oil and gas regulation in the state) Bo French was explicit: “It’s not just the Muslims, and it’s not just illegal immigration. We have roughly 100 million people in this country that shouldn’t be here.” His comments were interrupted by applause. He won his primary shortly after.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) was just as clear: “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.” Never mind that many American Muslims wouldn’t be going “back.” They were born here. Ogles doesn’t care, saying, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”
The Court and the President
Getting rid of birthright citizenship is the first step required to carry out these fantasies. Although the solicitor general told the Supreme Court that President Trump’s order applies only prospectively, to children born after it was signed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wouldn’t let him bypass the threat so easily.
“The logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president or the next president or Congress or someone else could decide it shouldn’t be prospective,” she said. “There would be nothing limiting that, according to your theory.” She went on to ask whether the government could, under its own reasoning, move to “unnaturalize people“ who were born here—which would add up to millions of Americans—if the Supreme Court rules in his favor. The solicitor general didn’t dispute the premise.
This is not just theoretical. When Trump was asked directly if he’d change his birthright order to apply retroactively, he implausibly claimed, “Honestly, I haven’t thought of that, but … our country cannot afford to house tens of millions of people who came in through birthright citizenship.” (Tens of millions—not just millions!) Indeed, when asked last year about deporting some Americans, he said: “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
The first ones against whom he might apply this “legal right” would be his political opponents like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, both of whose citizenship he has long questioned. Harris, in particular, would not have become a citizen at birth under his executive order that requires parents to have permanent legal status, whereas Harris’ were temporary legal residents.
Even if the Court tried to build in a grandfather clause and required that those who obtained their citizenship under the old—erroneous—understanding be able to keep it, Trump or Congress could argue that stipulation was not binding, and that the “true” constitutional interpretation is the controlling one. This is what Justice Sotomayor’s pointed line of questioning was aimed at exposing. In any case, the same potential for mass deportation of U.S.-born people would soon arise again, as many U.S.-born children were denied citizenship over the coming decades.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed the same logic from the other direction. The solicitor general had argued that the children of unauthorized migrants were outside the 14th Amendment because no such category of people existed in 1868. But as Barrett noted, there were in fact unauthorized migrants at the time: Africans trafficked into the country in violation of federal law. The solicitor general conceded, as he had to, that their U.S.-born children were citizens. The concession gives the game away.
Without birthright citizenship, our rights would depend not only on the citizenship of our parents or grandparents, but also on our ability to prove their citizenship. With “papers-please” police roaming the country to fill deportation quotas, the birth certificate has become the only foolproof defense against removal. Without it, we’d have to quickly produce evidence of our ancestors’ citizenship to avoid arrest and removal.
What the 14th Amendment Was Meant to Foreclose
The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was drafted, in part, to foreclose the possibility of ethnic cleansing. It protected the equal rights of all U.S.-born Americans. As professors Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman have shown, the only deportable immigrants in the 1860s were illegally trafficked slaves, and the clause unambiguously protected their children too.
Throughout the 19th century, however, many people believed that freed slaves should be sent to Africa. In 1866, as the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was drafted, Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders wrote to President Andrew Johnson to denounce the idea of Blacks being “cast away, driven into exile, for no other cause than having been freed from their chains.”
The one major group excluded from birthright citizenship, both before and after the 14th Amendment—the American Indians—were often driven from their homes. Although not the only justification, the denial of citizenship made it far easier to excuse the Indian Removal Act and other overt acts of ethnic cleansing until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Mass deportation is already facing severe logistical challenges, and birthright citizenship wouldn’t be the only legal barrier. Literally reaching 100 million deportations is unimaginable. But exposing millions of Americans to the threat of deportation would have important consequences anyway. The administration is already wielding immigration enforcement as a political weapon against Democratic-run cities, and it has already shown interest in targeting political opponents, who are citizens, based on their backgrounds.
Whether you think ethnic cleansing is likely or not, it should not even be on the constitutional table. Fortunately, most justices on the Supreme Court seemed skeptical about the government’s arguments. Hopefully they put a permanent end to these absurd fantasies.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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Like everything else the shameless charlatan David J. Bier writes about migration issues, this article is intellectually dishonest. If the Trump administration were truly intent on removing 100 million people (perhaps 80 million more than the existing population of illegal immigrants), it would be targeting poultry processing facilities in Arkansas and construction sites nationwide instead of making noises about finding those migrants some way to work legally. The Unpopulist is a solid enough outlet worth reading a significant fraction of the time, but its immigration coverage is farcical and David J. Bier is a comprehensively dishonest and unserious commentator.