Trump’s Plan To Deport 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants Impossible

According to a Time cover story based on two interviews with the former president and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, if re-elected, one of Trump’s key concerns is immigration and the southern border. Apart from reinstating policies from his first term, such as the Remain in Mexico program for asylum seekers and Title 42 expelling migrants for health reasons without letting them apply for asylum, he will direct federal funding to resume construction of the border wall and introduce several other measures. Among all these initiatives, one particular plan Trump has merits special attention.

The Time article says, “The capstone of this program, advisers say, would be a massive deportation operation that would target millions of people. Trump made similar pledges in his first term, but says he plans to be more aggressive in a second. ‘People need to be deported,’ says Tom Homan, a top Trump adviser and former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ‘No one should be off the table,’ use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million undocumented immigrants.”

Weakest Link Problem

There is a saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And the weakest link in Trump’s chain of thinking on immigration is precisely this plan to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Here is why.

First Deport Criminals

Firstly, it is important to distinguish between immigrants who simply entered this country unlawfully or have overstayed their period of authorized stay and criminals. To be more specific, of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, about one million have committed some sort of criminal offence. Of those, 300,000 have committed felonies. There is virtually no sympathy for immigrant felons, and even criminal aliens with lesser offences are not viewed with great sympathy by the general public. Trump would have little opposition to deporting most of these immigrants. But assuming we exclude those immigrants from this discussion, that leaves 10 million. How do we deal with the rest?

Who Are The Rest?

Let’s look at them more closely. More than 60 percent of the 10 million undocumented immigrants, or some six million people, have lived in the United States for at least a decade. That’s a long time. We are talking about immigrants who, apart from their immigration status, live normal, decent lives and who have families and jobs in the United States and who, for 10 years, have been contributing to America through their work and taxes. Roughly 50 percent are Mexicans, many with close family or social and cultural ties to America. Some four million of them are parents of children born in the United States. These are the cold, hard facts about them. Do all such immigrants merit wholesale deportations?

Past Massive Deportation Efforts Failed

In terms of deportations, while some previous Presidents have tried to deport unlawful immigrants from the USA, none came anywhere close to expelling as many as Trump is proposing. Not even President Eisenhower, who implemented Operation Wetback, came close to what Trump is proposing. A re-elected President Trump would soon discover that the task of removing undocumented immigrants is more difficult than it seems.

Constitutional Rights To Consider

Even undocumented immigrants in America have certain constitutional rights, particularly those who have been here for longer periods of time. For example, longer term noncitizens are entitled to the right to counsel, albeit at their own expense. They are also protected by at least the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process. These immigrants also have other legal protections. These constitutional rights mean that to remove illegal immigrants from America would require legal hearings in courtrooms. In addition to considering the rights of the defendants, this would create a logistical nightmare tying up the courts from dealing with other substantive issues. Judges, prosecutors, defence counsel as well as the persons concerned would all have to coordinate their calendars to schedule mutually agreeable dates for hearings before illegal immigrants could be deported. If you multiply this by some millions of cases you have a better idea of why legally removing these immigrants from America is going to take a long time and will be very expensive.

Not Every Country Will Accept U.S. Deportees

Suppose, however, Trump were able to round up these people and overcome or simply ignore these constitutional protections. What then? There could be an even bigger problem to be faced. Not every country is ready to receive deported immigrants returning home from America. A Migration Policy Institute report indicated that America was not able to deport immigrants to many countries. “As of mid-2020, it considered 13 countries and territories recalcitrant: Bhutan, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Pakistan, and Russia.” Furthermore, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone were publicly identified as being at risk of the classification. Add to that that in previous years, the United States has imposed visa penalties against Burundi, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, and Guyana for similar reasons. Indeed, any review of country names in consideration of the likelihood they will cooperate on this kind of massive effort suggests that it is possible that as many as over 150 countries could at any moment refuse to accept the deportation from the U.S. of their nationals.

What is Trump going to do then? Beat up on all these countries to try to force them to comply? It does not take much to imagine how much chaos and angst will be involved.

On the other hand, President Biden seeks to establish a road to citizenship for these immigrants. Not everyone welcomes this approach, however. It is criticized for seeking to reward undocumented immigrants instead of punishing them for coming to America illegally. Some condemn Biden’s approach as nothing less than another unmerited amnesty. Concerns about the impetus such a policy would give to future migrants thinking about migrating to America are real. While also likely to encounter setbacks, such as defining how it would result in shutting down unlawful border crossings if implemented, at least Biden’s plan may be viewed as more consistent with America’s democratic essence. But it too, is not well thought out and remains a work in progress.

In the end, it will be for American voters to decide which vision of America when they vote in the November presidential election.