Trump's Mass Deportation Pledge

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. We'll look now at one of the central policy proposals in the Trump campaign, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He's going beyond his signature build that wall campaign platform to rounding up millions of people and sending them back to their countries of origin. One of the commonly seen signs at the Republican Convention last week, you may have noticed, simply read, "Mass deportation." Trump backed it up in his acceptance speech.

Trump: To keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.

Brian Lehrer: There's a quote making the rounds originally published on the news site Semafor by Tom Homan who was an immigration official in Trump's presidency, Homan saying, "Trump comes back in January." This is a quote, "Trump comes back in January. I'll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force in history." What would mass deportation actually involve? Who wants it or not? What would its effects be on those being rounded up and on others?

With me now, Felipe De La Hoz, contributing member of the New York Daily News editorial board and a lecturer at the NYU College of Arts and Sciences. He has an article on Slate published last week called The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Scariest Part of Trump's 2025 Agenda. Felipe, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Felipe De La Hoz: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the Supreme Court aspect of it from that headline, but first you note that mass deportation isn't just a slogan. The Project 2025 policy book made by the Heritage Foundation think tank to influence Trump includes a 37-page Homeland Security chapter which is largely immigration focused. What do you think they're actually planning beyond the slogan?

Felipe De La Hoz: Well, the details are varied depending on who the interlocutor is. Obviously, the most well-known Trump immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, has gotten into some detail about it on a podcast with Charlie Kirk and other places. The contours are essentially, yes, they would want to have armed personnel, typically National Guard or sometimes, in some tellings even, military branch troops coming into cities like New York, Baltimore, and cities in the South and putting people, taking them out of their apartments and putting them into some kind of staging areas or camps and deporting them from the country.

Doing that as a coordinated military operation within the United States, that's part of Project 2025, which is not technically Trump-affiliated, but very closely Trump-linked set of policy proposals developed by the Heritage Foundation and Trump administration officials and others. It seems to be a pretty driving force of the policy rollout of the campaign.

Brian Lehrer: What would it take to round up millions of people and deport them?

Felipe De La Hoz: Logistically, it seems very difficult to even approach the numbers that they're talking about, which they've put at 15 to 20 million roughly, which, by the way, exceeds the total estimates of the undocumented population in the entire country, so certainly calls into question who exactly would be in the crosshairs here. At minimum, it would require a much larger force than even Border Patrol and ICE currently have, which is why I think they're so focused on the military angle.

It would require deployment of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of troops across the country. It would be almost impossible to do, I think, without coordination from local governments, which they are unlikely to play ball, but anything is possible with the president's full commitment to a policy like this.

Brian Lehrer: Do they identify criteria for who they would deport? Is it mostly people with criminal records who are already in many cases subject to deportation or would just being here be more of a trigger than in the past? Obama, as president, also got criticized by advocates, as I'm sure you know, as a deporter-in-chief.

Felipe De La Hoz: Yes. Trump himself and Miller have not drawn any distinctions here between somebody who might just be a longtime undocumented person without any contact with law enforcement or other violations and the hardened criminals that they like to point to as the typical migrant coming across the border, and so especially given some of the numbers that have been presented as targets, it does really seem like they're not keen on drawing a lot of distinctions between different types of immigrants.

I think a lot of people fear that such an operation would target basically all undocumented people and people, for example, with TPS or DACA or other deferred statuses and possibly people with status--

Brian Lehrer: Those are legal statuses. If you have a temporary protected status because you're from a country that's been deemed trouble enough to let you stay here, like people from Haiti who were here before the earthquake, I think there's another round recently of TPS for people from Haiti here before a certain date, and DACA certainly, those people have legal status at the moment.

Felipe De La Hoz: Yes. It's a limbo status where they don't have a permanent status, but they've been allowed by federal discretionary programs to stay. Trump has, in several instances, referenced the program in the '50s that came under President Eisenhower at the time, which was, forgive me for using an offensive term, but it was the official name of the operation, it was called Operation Wetback, which aim to have military style tactics to round up people that were perceived to be undocumented.

Most historians agree that that operation did indeed end up rounding up and deporting a number of US citizens of Mexican descent who just were caught up in the fray and who didn't really have a chance to prove their citizenship, not to mention very inhumane process to determine other people. The fact of this being pointed to as a parallel and as a precedent, I think, also gives some credence to the idea of this being a haphazard operation that's more about show of force than a formal due process for the people involved.

Brian Lehrer: People are starting to call in already. Let me give out the phone number to everybody. Listeners, 212-433-WNYC, your questions or comments welcome about the prospect of Trump fulfilling his campaign promise of mass deportation and the largest deportation force in US history. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Would this affect you or anyone you know, potentially, if you're a legal resident or a citizen?

You just heard our guest, Felipe De La Hoz, from the Daily News editorial board and NYU saying how when they did this in the '50s, yes, even US citizens were rounded up and deported to Mexico in that case before they could prove their citizenship, but if you're a legal resident or naturalized citizen, but an immigrant, are you for this? Do you think it would make your life better in some way, no matter who you are, or do you find it revolting? Would it be a voting issue one way or the other for you? This is a centerpiece of Trump's reelection campaign. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Let's take a phone call right now. He is Hasan in Paterson in Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hello, Hasan.

Hasan: Good morning, Brian. Long-time listener. That's my four times I have an honor of speaking with you and your guest. My answer to your guests and everybody else listening to this nonsense. When is Mexico going to pay for everything? That's another garbage coming out of the former president's mouth. First of all, in order to collect all these people, including what happened during Eisenhower, because I'm familiar with that era because I have relatives that they were deported to Mexico at that time.

My point of view is this. We need to stop dwelling on the nonsense. We need to challenge them. We need to ask these people how you plan to do? He said Mexico is going to pay for everything. When is Mexico going to pay for everything? How Mexico is going to pay for everything? Rather than being elaborate how they plan to do, they just using a bunch of other side idiots that they believe his nonsense. We need to stop this. Come on. Our side is wrapped up with his garbage.

How are you going to pay for it? Do you understand what we're going to do? We're going to completely neutralize our military, do nothing, just go around. By the way most of illegal immigrants are in the red states because we have farming up there. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida. Is he going to go to those states and collect these people too? Come on, man.

Brian Lehrer: Hasan, thank you very much. Well, he makes some really good points and, obviously, passionately. What about the cost? Just to pick up on one of the things that Hasan said in that call. Has anybody on the Trump campaign bothered to cost it out and release those numbers?

Felipe De La Hoz: Not that I've seen. I think a very passionate caller brings up several good points, as you mentioned, which is that this would require an extraordinary expenditure of resources on the military, and National Guard units would be activated in theory by the president. There would have to be a lot of infrastructure that would have to be built, essentially. They want to keep people in camps that would have to be, I guess, constructed.

There would have to be military planes is the theory on how they're actually going to remove people. Then there's the cost on the backend which is that, I don't need to tell you, Brian, if we rounded up all the undocumented people in this country, if such a thing were even possible, the next day the economy would collapse. Bar none, there's no question that it would instantly be the worst decision for the US economy potentially ever made. Not to mention, obviously, the human cost, which I think is important to keep at the forefront of the mind here. This would have enormously detrimental impacts on the economy if it doesn't actually even approach the numbers that we're talking about here.

Brian Lehrer: What about the caller's point that many of the undocumented people in this country are in red states working for red state employers such as agriculture?

Felipe De La Hoz: Sure. I think Miller has said that they would want to use the National Guards of the states that the people are in. In fact, he created a bit of a kerfuffle by saying that non-cooperative blue states would have neighboring red state National Guards come in and do the operation instead of their own, I guess, more sympathetic National Guard units. It is true immigrants are spread out all over the country, including in blue and red states and business, agribusiness, tech, the medical field, all sorts of very giant industries are largely opposed to anything that would impact the labor market and also just spook the markets in general.

This is a very red meat policy proposal that I think is not supported by a lot of the traditional business-friendly conservative Republican chamber of commerce type people and entities that would be aligned with the Trump campaign on other fronts.

Brian Lehrer: I want to get to the Supreme Court aspect of this. For listeners who weren't here at the beginning of the segment, one of the things that prompted us to invite you to talk about this was your article on Slate called The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Scariest Part of Trump's 2025 Agenda. I see, by the way, that we have a caller. Nancy in Otis, Mass, standby we will go to you on another aspect of something the Supreme Court did this year than you wrote about, but talk about that. Which Supreme Court decision were you referring to in your article?

Felipe De La Hoz: This was the Trump v. United States decision. The one that involved broadly whether the Jack Smith, the special counsel, could prosecute Trump for the classified documents case. That came down to a question, not just about the merits of that case, but whether it was possible to prosecute a president for "official acts" that he committed while in office. The Supreme Court essentially issued a ruling where they said that the president is fully immune from prosecution for acts that are core acts of the presidency as described in the Constitution and is presumptively immune from other official acts that are not constitutional.

The point that I was making in this article is I think a lot of people have waived off this idea of a mass deportation scheme using the military, not just because of the logistics, but because of the legality where there is a longstanding legal principle in the United States called Posse Comitatus that came right after the Civil War, which states that-- it's a federal law that prohibits the use of the military for any kind of domestic law enforcement, except in a few instances of invasion and rebellion and things like that.

My point was by making Trump, or I guess any potential president completely immune from prosecution for constitutional functions of the presidency, one of which is the use of the military, the Supreme Court essentially clears the path for Trump to order the military to do these illegal things and he can't face criminal prosecution nor any civil liability because in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a decision from decades ago, the president was also made immune from any kind of civil liability for official acts.

He could just order the military to do this. There would be no way to hold him accountable unless he was impeached, which is already something that has failed twice. This makes it much more legally feasible, if not necessarily logistically feasible for him to move forward with this operation.

Brian Lehrer: Well, this is such an important point and has such huge implications because if people heard the immunity decision as just protecting Trump or any president from prosecution if they commit a crime-- the way we usually think of crime, like committing fraud or stealing something or fomenting an insurrection, that's one thing.

You are saying he would be immune from just breaking the laws that bind the president to certain executive branch functions so that if the law states that they can't use the military for domestic enforcement, he can just do that. Even though that would be against the law, he can do that as a matter of policy with impunity. If we take that as true, then there are so many things that he could do that really would make him a dictator.

Felipe De La Hoz: Sure. The other point I was making is this decision only applies to the president, but another constitutional function of the presidency, the power of pardon. There was an issue in that Supreme Court decision where I don't think this came up in the decision itself, but there had been talk of Trump possibly attempting to sell pardons. That would be allowed under the Supreme Court precedent that would just set.

Trump could order his departments and the military to do all sorts of illegal things, and then offer pardons to anyone who acted on those orders. There's nothing in the Supreme Court decision that prevents that. I'm writing about it here in the context of this military deportation scheme, but you can imagine its application to all sorts of rather frightening federal functions.

Brian Lehrer: Nancy in Otis, Massachusetts in the Berkshires, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nancy.

Nancy: Hi. You just answered my question. I had called asking or saying since the president has immunity, can't he just deport anyone he chooses? I am very sorry to hear the answer, but I have just heard the answer to my question.

Brian Lehrer: Nancy, thank you. I thought your question, as I understood it from a screener, raises an aspect that we actually didn't get to in the last answer, which is due process for those who are rounded up. You wrote about how it can take years for people who are considered for deportation to actually go through the deportation process. I wonder if you think the immunity decision does what Nancy said in exactly the way that she said it, or would there be a lot of due process that makes the process even slower and more expensive for the federal government and for the taxpayers than we've talked about yet?

Felipe De La Hoz: Sure. No, I'm glad you bring this up, Brian, because I don't want to leave the impression necessarily that the Supreme Court has cleared this operation to just happen as it's been designed and described by its proponents because while the president is fully able to order this operation and people are empowered under the pardon to carry it out, there are other laws that conflict. Civil immigration law is very complex. People probably are aware of how long it typically actually takes cases to move through the courts because of all the asylum seekers that are going through removal proceedings and trying to seek asylum as a defense to that.

Under the law, you do have a right to a civil immigration proceeding to determine if you can stay in the country. The way that Stephen Miller and Trump are describing it seems to almost glide over that as a concept, not even care about that. I can imagine that there would be legal strategies to try to demand that the government release people. Like I mentioned in the article, habeas corpus, the constitutional principle that you cannot be held by the government without process.

I think that would be a very strong argument if somebody actually was arrested by the military in an operation like this to claim that that was an unlawful detention. Even if the president is able to order it, there are impediments to going forward in that same way. Now, all of that, I guess, runs up into into practicality. We saw, for example, during the first Trump administration, where there were several policies that were eventually struck down by the courts, but not before people had already been ensnared by them.

We saw this a lot with asylum policy, where there would be something that would come down, a lot of people would get turned away or deported or expelled, and then eventually a judge would step in and say, "Hey, you can't do this," but the damage gets done in the interim. That's a concern as well.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Here is Craig in Queens. Craig, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Craig: Hey, Brian. Good morning to you and your guest. I just want to push back a little bit. I'm not an economist, so [unintelligible 00:21:27] for higher taxes, but the notion that the economy would collapse if all the people that were undocumented would disappear, why should we have an economy that's dependent on the backs of people that's in the shadows? That's number one. Number two, the low-hanging fruit, people driving without licenses, people working in places that don't probably e-verify, they could round up hundreds of thousands of people just doing that.

Punishing the businesses truly with fines would pay for that. If they wanted to, they can take the money out of the people's pocket who is working illegally, because like they did for people that sold drugs, if you have money that you obtain through illegal means because you're not licensed, you're legally not allowed to work in the country, so you shouldn't have that money, that could cause a lot of damage.

For the Democratic side that keep saying, "Oh, the other side, they just overblowing the problems, the problem is not a problem," and the other side saying, "There is a problem." It's a lot less truth on their side, but living in a city like New York, I watch people only rent to undocumented people because they can control them. They only hire undocumented people so they control them. The guy that called previous segment who said he had people working in low-wage job for 20 years, like that was a proud thing. That's not what we want. That's my comment, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Craig, thank you very much. Felipe?

Felipe De La Hoz: Sure. No, I think there are a lot of good points there to pull on a little bit. One of them is that the undocumented population has ballooned enormously. It's actually dipped in recent years, but the last time we really had a federal amnesty was under Reagan in '86. When millions of people were legalized to do a bill that was passed and signed by the Republican president, and the sky didn't fall. That did include criminal penalties for people employing undocumented immigrants.

Actually, it's technically not a federal crime to work without authorization, but I don't want to get into all the weeds of all that stuff. The other point is that we do actually have a pretty robust immigration enforcement system as it stands, and people do get deported, hundreds of thousands of them over several years. We have Border Patrol is one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies. ICE is a very robust nationwide agency that operate within certain constraints.

They do this monitor people that they're going to detain, they prioritize who they're going to detain. There's the prosecutorial aspect of it, where there's a court case and all this stuff, and that's how the system works now. I think what people find alarming about this operation that's been presented isn't necessarily that it would be rounding people up or going after people who don't have status. If they don't have status, I think a lot of Americans agree that's a problem and people should have a process to determine whether they can stay in the country.

I think the main concern is that this seems like there would be no evaluation of whether somebody really does have status or not. It would just be really wide-ranging saying that, that is not really observing of any persons given status or rights or whatever, and using the military. I think a lot of people actually would support enforcement conceptually and with certain guardrails but are spooked by this type of plan.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer in Yorkville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hi. I'm an ENL, that is English as a New Language, it used to be ESL, teacher at Sunset Park High School, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I really hope that-- [chuckles] Your guest has some good advice of what we can tell our students. We have a dream team and we consult with immigration lawyers, and we give advice like, "Don't answer your door if somebody comes knocking," but I don't know, is there anything else that we can tell students who are going to be really scared come September?

Felipe De La Hoz: Sure. I say a few things for now, and then we'll have to see how the election pans out. The Biden administration has issued directives to federal law enforcement, immigration enforcement about prioritization. They've returned to a more strict prioritization scheme, where the people at the top of the list would be people are considered national security threats, or people who have a criminal record of a certain type or a recent arrivals.

By and large, we haven't really seen as much of a targeting of people who don't otherwise have recently been in the crosshairs. The other thing, I think, is keeping in mind that a lot of this comes down to local cooperation and local policymaking. The main reason I would say that we did not see a-- Trump never hit the rates of deportation, the first Obama term did, not because he didn't want to, but because localities like New York, like the state, put in place policies that they would, for example, not communicate certain information to ICE. They would wall off certain systems, that they would have these sanctuary policies.

I think for folks who are in New York City and other "friendlier" municipalities and states, and even those, I guess, in unfriendlier jurisdictions, really pushing or making these needs known at a local level is so much more effective than people realize. People think of immigration policy as this purely federal thing, and really it's just the federal government that can enforce that type of law and set policy, but a lot of these practically gets determined by decisions made by local and state officials. That's a good place to focus attention if you want to see change on that front.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer, I hope that's helpful with some of your students who might rightly be very afraid when they come back to school in September like you say. We have just a few minutes left with Felipe De La Hoz, contributor to the Daily News editorial board, a lecturer at NYU, and author now the article in Slate called The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Scariest Part of Trump's 2025 Agenda. It's the mass deportation, the largest deportation force in US history campaign promise, if you want to call it a promise, from Donald Trump that he articulated at the Republican Convention, and we saw those people carrying mass deportation signs at the convention. One more call. Kabir in East Setauket, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kabir.

Kabir: Hi, Brian, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Okay, thank you.

Kabir: Thank you so much for giving me a chance. I work as a volunteer at Creedmoor Shelter on Hillside Avenue in Queens. First thing, I'm very disappointed in Mayor Adams's administration. They're basically stealing from the refugees as far as the resources concern. Especially African refugees, they're not getting any resources whatsoever. They have no representation whatsoever. Hispanics and Ukrainian refugees have tremendous amount of representation in the government, so they're getting all the resources, and unfortunately, African refugees are not getting any resources. They're not even getting halal meals.

Second thing I wanted to ask is, I don't think Americans are educated on the cost of deportation. It will cost you $10,000 to $20,000 per person to deport somebody. A person, given a work authorization, can easily contribute $10,000 to $20,000 per year in taxes. New York State needs these refugees. I'm an accountant. I only look at numbers. I really don't care about politics anymore. It's all garbage. What it comes down to is, we have lost 10% to 20% of our population in the past 20 years.

We're going to keep depleting our resources as far as Medicare, Social Security, all those perks that we get when we get old. We don't have enough people contributing to that stuff in New York State, especially in New York State. These refugees are blessing in disguise. These guys are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, they're going to be working for decades to come. I don't understand what happened to New York State when it came to their open hearts, open minds.

I feel like only Europeans when they arrive at the-- What do you call it? The Statue of Liberty that's like the Hollywood production we have in our mind, but when it comes to real stuff, we just shy away from it. We look for Donald Trump to deport these people. I feel like we need to pay attention to the numbers. It will cost you more money to deport a person, and that person can generate that much money in a year, and over the lifetime, they can contribute millions of dollars towards the taxes and many other things.

Brian Lehrer: Kabir, thank you very much. Yes, it's a whole economic conversation that we've had here, but that I don't hear a lot of in the media, Felipe, about how the economy needs a lot of immigration for one thing. If the biggest threats to the US Federal Government, economically speaking, are the costs of Medicare and Social Security as we have an aging population without a replacement rate in terms of births, immigrants in large numbers create a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio that a lot of European countries and Japan, for example, without the rates of immigration that we have don't have and will fall victim to, so the pure economic case that Kabir makes.

One last thing, because he works with some of those, I think he called them refugees, at that shelter in Queens. I think they're the same people, by and large, who we usually refer to these days as the asylum seekers, who are the people who have been coming recently in the so-called migrant crisis. They're asylum seekers, right? They have rights. If they think they're going to quickly turn around the large number of people that have come in the last few years, those people come, they claim asylum because of conditions in their countries, and you can't just-- I don't even think Trump could just round up those people who have an asylum claim filed and deport them without those claims being adjudicated.

Felipe De La Hoz: Yes, that's right. I want to make just two quick points, based on what your caller said. You have people like Trump vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who's obsessed with birth rates and declining populations and industrial hollowing out and Rust Belt decline, and blah, blah, blah, and then simultaneously being extremely anti-immigration. Square that circle. I think we all know what the difference is, in his view.

Also, to just use the local example, I often point to the City of Buffalo, which over the last decade and a half or a couple of decades has received a large share of refugees.

This time not necessarily asylum seekers, but through the separate, very similar refugee program. There have been a lot of people who've looked at Buffalo and credited refugee arrivals with an economic revitalization and cultural revitalization. The evidence exists, that it's possible to assimilate folks and have them actually contribute to the local economy and the local culture. Obviously, you could say that that's basically the history of New York City as a whole, but it's just thinking about things in a slightly longer term and not letting us get governed by the politics of fear is how I believe it.

Brian Lehrer: Felipe De La Hoz, lecture at NYU, contributed to the Daily News editorial board, and author now the article in Slate, The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Scariest Part of Trump's 2025 Agenda. Thanks so much for coming on with us.

Felipe De La Hoz: Thank you, Brian.

 

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