Before we ask if Donald Trump can deport millions, remember this: Barack Obama already showed us how. His administration deported 3 million people without military help – just U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, buses, and a ruthless efficiency that earned him the name ‘Deporter-in-Chief.” Parents like Andres Jimenez were sent away for driving without a license, leaving five American children behind. Trump’s first term saw fewer deportations, but now he’s promising to add military muscle.
The Biden administration’s border-centric approach contrasts with former President Donald Trump’s previous focus on interior deportations and his signature and executive order restricting entry from several Muslim-majority countries. from the interior of the U.S. Trump’s immigration legacy differs, with its laser-focus on building a wall at the southern border and a “Muslim ban,” which barred immigrants from 6 Muslim-majority countries from entering the country During his first presidency, Trump deported 1.5 million people, according to CNN, which is only a fraction of Obama’s immigration track-record. However, given his recent announcements it looks like the president-elect is revving up to take on a bigger impact on immigration in the U.S. this time around.
“I think he’s trying to do anything possible to scapegoat immigrants as the problem,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.
Through rhetoric targeting immigrant and migrant communities on the campaign trail, tapping former ICE director Tom Homan as border czar, and announcing his plan to use the military, Trump signals an intensified approach to immigration. ICE is already expanding its facilities. The planned detention center scheduled to open in New Jersey next year will have 600 beds, following ICE’s expressed plans for expanding in 15 states, as Detention Watch Network reported in September.
As the plan towards mass deportation solidifies, advocates say expanding ICE facilities is cruel and ineffective.
“If realized, ICE’s expansion plan will also increase the targeting and racial profiling of people within their communities based on what they look like, the language they speak, and where they work while further exacerbating the detention system that is rife with abuse,” Marcela Hernandez, organizing and membership director at Detention Watch Network said.
The deportation infrastructure is already in place
According to Shah, the Obama administration moved away from mass raids following the Bush administration’s 2008 raid at an Iowa meat processing plant where 389 migrant workers were arrested. Obama streamlined collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement through programs such as Secure Communities, which led to over 750,000 deportations before its termination in 2014.
“They [deportations] were going up under Bush, and they just kept going higher because the Obama administration made the system more efficient at targeting people and those people who had had interactions with the criminal legal system,’ Shah said.
In many cases, a detained person will be held in a detention center before going to trial or being deported out of the country – a process which the U.S. spends over $3 billion a year on, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center.
ICE operates over 200 detention centers, jails, and prisons across the U.S., housing 37,509 detainees in July 2024. These overcrowded, under resourced facilities have been deemed “barbaric” by some accounts. Reports by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties detail the concerning conditions.
According to NPR, reports from 2017 to 2019 depict unsafe and dirty conditions, mistreatment of mentally ill detainees, and negligence of medical care, including falsified documents stating that a detainee who requested an inhaler was seen by medical personnel when he wasn’t. First hand accounts reveal the reality of living under ICE’s watch.
Former detainee Ana Navarro, who entered the country without documentation and survived domestic abuse, , described neglect in Dodge County Jail in Wisconsin, where she says there were no Spanish translators, and detainees were locked in their cells all day and only allowed out for meals.
“Imagine being confined to a tiny area all day long, without access to nutritious food, hygiene, all while being cold and struggling with your mental health. It was worse than prison, since there was nothing to do. There were no activities for the people, no access to fresh air and more indignities,” Navarro wrote in South Side Weekly in February.
The Department of Homeland Security (including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE), the Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Justice oversee immigrant detention with procedures varying by state.
Places like Texas with hostile immigration landscapes have intricate networks of agents monitoring not only along the U.S.-Mexico border, but policing residents through a series of checkpoints scattered throughout the state to question individuals about their immigration status. An executive order by Gov. Greg Abbott now requires hospitals that accept Medicaid or CHIP coverage to ask patients about their status, making emergency room visits potential points of detention.
“Right now people are going to be afraid because they’re going to be asked their immigration status, which was already a fear to begin with. A lot of people don’t like to go to doctors or to official places like that, because they’re afraid of being asked about their immigration status, but this is an executive order, now they’re going to be asked about it,” said Zaena Zamora, executive director of Frontera Fund, an abortion fund serving people within 100 miles of the Texas-Mexico border told Reckon in August.
In fiscal year (FY) 2024, ICE allocated funding for 41,500 beds, the third highest amount in Congressional history. The American Immigration Council reports ICE may detain more, by shifting money from other allocations, as in FY 2019, when more than 55,000 people were detained even though Congress budgeted for 40,520.
Still, Shah says preventing Trump from securing funding is critical.
“He’s going to ask for a lot of supplemental money, billions of dollars to carry this out, and so I think doing everything we can to get the Democrats to hold the line and not allow the scales of money he’s asking for is going to be really critical,” she said.
How a second Trump administration can enforce the military for immigration
Last week, Trump named Tom Homan, his former ICE director, border czar, a position in which he will be responsible for U.S. borders, maritime security and deportation. The Associated Press reports Homan has publicly expressed plans to run the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history.
“No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder,” Homan said at the National Conservatism Conference in July.
Trump announced his plans to declare a national emergency and utilize the military, though details remain unclear.
Legal experts suggest Trump could use the military through the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that allows the president to deploy the military domestically to suppress civil unrest. The last time the law was implemented was when President George H.W. Bush deployed troops during the 1992 L.A. Riots.
Analysis by Vox suggests by painting a picture of criminals entering across the Southern border, Trump may peg his “war on Mexican cartels” and human trafficking as justification for emergency intervention.
Alissa Cooley Yonesawa, managing attorney at the UNLV Immigration Clinic in Las Vegas, said that military deployment might be legally possible, but the barriers of gathering Congressional support and finding capacity to detain more people suggest fear-mongering.
“I still don’t think that they have the organization and the infrastructure and the manpower to get that done, and I don’t think that’s something that’s going to happen in the initial years of the administration,” she said.
Trump also wants to end birthright citizenship, sparking social media debate after the election.
“That’s not something that can just happen overnight. That’s not an executive order where he can just sign a piece of paper and it’s done, I mean, that’s in the Constitution,” said Cooley Yonesawa. “And so we think anything that’s on social media about birthright citizenship is generally going to be a distraction, political fear, fear antics to distract from really the scarier and more likely things that could be going on. It’s kind of like a ‘look over there.’”
She is more concerned about the expansion of Expedited Removal, where non-citizens face deportation without a hearing, potentially easing pressure on the immigration courts now facing 3 million pending cases.
“The expansion of Expedited Removal means bringing border policy into our communities, away from the border, and so that means that an ICE officer could stop you or I on the street… and then ask me to prove that I’ve been in the United States for two years,” she said.
Shah expresses concern about military involvement centers on the potential for military bases to become detention centers.
“They all have horrible conditions already, but I think there is some concern because, you know, they need somewhere to detain people in order to deport them,” said Shah.
More on Obama and what that means/Trump building on the Deporter-in-Chief legacy
Obama earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” while simultaneously softening his stance on undocumented youth through establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which gave more than 800,000 DREAMers, or children brought to the U.S. as children, protection from deportation. Obama perpetuated harmful narratives painting immigrants as criminals, which politicians continue to play on today.
Shah said that Obama helped cement the “good immigrant” vs. “bad immigrant” narrative, using messaging that characterized some immigrants as criminals and others as families pursuing the American Dream.
“Over the past six years deportations of criminals are up 80%, and that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security,” Obama declared in a controversial 2014 speech on immigration. “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”
The human and economic toll of mass deportation
Lucía Quiej, Jimenez’s wife, and mother to their five children bear the emotional and economic impact of their father’s deportation – whose arrest came for driving without a license.
The National Institution of Health reports even U.S. citizens who know someone deported or detained are more likely to experience anxiety, depression and psychological distress.
The ripple effects of deportations extend beyond individual families into entire communities. According to the National Institution of Health, even U.S. citizens who know someone who has been deported or detained experience increased rates of anxiety, depression and psychological distress. These mental health impacts compound existing economic challenges.
In communities with high deportation rates, remaining families often face immediate financial crisis when wage-earning parents are deported, leading to increased reliance on social services and community support networks. Some children leave school to work and support their families, creating long-term educational and economic consequences.
The economic impact reaches far beyond immigrant communities. As economics professor Zeke Hernandez of the Wharton School noted in The Guardian, mass deportations would create significant labor shortages across key American industries. Agriculture, where undocumented workers comprise an estimated 50% of the workforce, would be particularly hard hit, along with construction, service industries, and food processing sectors. These workforce gaps could trigger supply chain disruptions and price increases affecting all Americans.
“It would be an economic disaster for America and Americans,” Hernandez said. “It’s not just the immigrants would be harmed, but we, the people of America, would be economically harmed.”