On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to begin “the largest deportation program in American history.” How exactly he plans to carry that out, and how many he ultimately intends to deport, remains unclear.
Although Trump puts the number of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally at more than 20 million (without providing backup), the Pew Research Center estimates the number at 11 million as of mid-2022, based on the latest Census data. Trump has occasionally said that all of them will have to leave and apply to legally get back in. At other times, when pressed about how he will accomplish that, Trump has said he plans to initially target immigrants in the country illegally who have committed crimes and immigrants whose asylum bids were denied by the courts, but who have still not left the country.
“On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in American history,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania the day before the election. “We’re going to get them out. We have to. Dwight Eisenhower has the record. … But we’re going to unfortunately beat the record.”
Trump was referring to a program under President Eisenhower in 1954 dubbed “Operation Wetback,” a federally led effort to remove Mexican immigrants illegally living in the U.S. (The term “wetback” is a slur applied to Mexicans who swam or waded across the Rio Grande.) The federal government claimed to have forced as many as 1.3 million people to return to Mexico. Historians have disputed that figure, but nonetheless it is the benchmark that Trump has vowed to exceed.
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Immigration experts warn, however, that there are many logistical hurdles, including budget constraints and legal challenges. But to the extent he is successful — and contrary to Trump’s assertions — many economists warn mass deportations will likely hurt the economy, drive up inflation and reduce employment and wages for native-born workers.
We’ll explain Trump’s proposal, what experts say about it and how it compares to statements he made in 2016.
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What Is Trump Proposing?
The GOP platform says Trump will “begin the largest deportation program in American History,” including “the millions of illegal Migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country” and starting with removing “the most dangerous criminals and working with local Police.”
“All of the illegal migrants that [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] has dumped into your small towns will be going home,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Michigan in October. “You’re going to have to go home. I’m sorry. Because it’s not sustainable, and it’s going to be very hard to do. It’s a very hard thing to do.”
Trump’s appointment of Tom Homan as border czar and Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff — both hardliners on immigration — suggests he intends to follow through with an aggressive approach to deportations.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the New York Times in November 2023, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
According to the New York Times, “To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Mr. Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.”
On Nov. 18, Trump responded “True” to a post that speculated the Trump administration was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
In remarks at the Heritage Policy Fest in July, Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 and 2018, reiterated comments he made the week before, that if Trump is elected, “You ain’t seen nothing yet [on immigration]. Wait until 2025.”
Homan has since clarified that the Trump administration will first target immigrants who have committed — or been accused of — crimes, a number he put at 1.5 million (though that appears to be too high). Homan said the Trump administration will also target for deportation the estimated 1.3 million immigrants whose asylum bids were denied, but who have still not left the country.
But he pushed back on claims about a deportation force sweeping neighborhoods and businesses in search of immigrants.
“People say, Trump’s threatening this historic deportation operations. He’s going to build concentration camps. He’s going to sweep neighborhoods. Let me be clear. None of that will happen,” Homan said at the Heritage Policy Fest. “We are going to have a historic deportation operation, because you’ve got a historic, illegal immigration crossing the southern border. If you look at immigration court data … nearly 9 out of 10 of these people won’t get asylum because they don’t qualify. So they’re going to be ordered removed. They’ll get a federal order saying you must leave.”
“So when they get due process at billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and a federal judge says ‘You must go home,’ the Trump administration is going to make them go home,” Homan added. “And it’s going to require an historic deportation operation.”
Nonetheless, Homan also would not rule out eventually deporting all other immigrants in the country illegally.
“Bottom line is, under Trump he’s still going to prioritize national security threats and criminals,” Homan said. “But no one’s off the table. If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
As we said, there were an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as of mid-2022. Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Research Center, told us “it’s safe to say the numbers have grown since mid-2022 and there are significantly more immigrants in the ‘quasi-legal’ group.” That “quasi-legal” group includes immigrants lacking permanent legal status who have temporary protection from deportation and may be authorized to work. That includes immigrants granted temporary protected status due to civil unrest, violence or natural disasters in their home country; immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, because they were brought to the U.S. as children; asylum applicants; and immigrants from Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela provided special “parole” protections.
“They are not immediately deportable with their current status but their status could be revoked and they would become deportable if policy changes,” Passel said.
Most of the immigrants living in the U.S. illegally or with temporary legal status have been in the country for years.
“According to our estimates for 2022 (July 1), the median time in the US was 15 years and more than 6 of 10 (61%) had been in the country 10 years or more,” Passel told us via email. “In the case of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico (the largest group by far), the median time in the US was almost 22 years and more than 5 of 6 (84%) had been in the US 10 years or more.”
While some immigration experts doubt that Trump will be able to achieve the mass deportations he has promised, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, has said it will be done with a “sequential” approach. Vance likened the problem to “a really big sandwich … you take the first bite and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite.”
“Let’s start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point,” Vance said at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania in August.
“You’ve got to do something with the people who are already here,” Vance said on ABC’s “This Week” on Aug. 11. “And I think that you take a sequential approach to it. You are going to have to deport some people. If you’re not willing to deport a lot of people, you’re not willing to have a border when there are 20 million illegal aliens in our country.”
Aside from trump and Vance inflating the number of people who have come to the country illegally during the Biden administration, Trump and Homan appear to be inflating the number of immigrants in the country illegally who have been charged or convicted of crimes. In September, ICE Deputy Director Patrick J. Lechleitner reported to Congress: “As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket. … Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.”
That includes more than 125,000 convicted of or facing traffic offenses. Another 92,000 are on the list for immigration offenses.
The Biden administration already prioritizes the removal of those who pose a danger to public safety or national security. The number of deportations dipped in Biden’s first two years (see table 39 of the Department of Homeland Security’s 2022 Yearbook), but have increased since and are on pace to equal Trump’s deportation total.
“I don’t want to diminish the impact that a Trump administration will have with respect to civil rights or aggressive immigration enforcement tactics,” John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE in the Obama administration, told the Financial Times in October. “If his supporters believe that he’s suddenly going to come and magically deport a million people per year, he’s lying to them.”
In order to “dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil,” Trump has promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. That’s a wartime authority extended to the president, “Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” In such a situation, the act allows the president to apprehend, detain and deport citizens of that hostile nation who are not naturalized citizens of the U.S. Some experts, however, question whether Trump could constitutionally invoke the law as he intends.
Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, told us in a phone interview that while he expects the number of removals by the Trump administration may rise to less than 400,000 a year (about a third more than the average in his first term), he believes a strict enforcement climate will encourage more immigrants in the country illegally to leave on their own, and fewer to attempt to come in. As a result, he expects that if the Trump administration “puts their money where their mouth is,” the immigrant population without permanent legal status — which he estimates to have climbed over the last two years to about 14 million — will decline by about 1 million per year over the next four years.
The Cost
Aside from the numerous legal hurdles that would threaten Trump’s mass deportation plan, immigration experts say it would be enormously expensive.
The American Immigration Council, a nonpartisan advocacy group for immigrants, estimates a one-time mass deportation of all of the immigrant in the U.S. without legal status would cost $315 billion. A yearslong deportation program — which is more like what Trump and Vance have described — would cost nearly $1 trillion, which the AIC called a “conservative” estimate.
“It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years,” Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, told the New York Times in July, adding that it would cost billions of dollars and would likely take 20 years.
“Trump would need to triple the size of the immigration court to achieve anywhere near the numbers he is talking about,” Sandweg told the New York Times. “Even then, he would need funding to build new courthouses, hire support staff and train judges.”
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, told us in a phone interview that at the current funding level, “I do not think that it would be possible to carry out deportation at the scale that Trump and his advisers are talking about.”
Under the Biden administration, she said, ICE resources have been concentrated on deportations at the border. Trump is talking about interior enforcement, Putzel-Kavanaugh said, “And so that would mean taking ICE resources, as they currently are, away from the border, and refocusing them on the interior. And so at current resource levels, it would just require an immense amount more of staffing and more money, quite frankly, to be able to carry it out in the way that he’s describing.”
With Republicans now in control of both the House and Senate, she said, “it is plausible that increased resources could be given to ICE through the appropriations process, but I’m not sure if they would be at the level needed to conduct something like this.”
Adding to the cost is that the immigrant profile has changed in recent years, with more immigrants coming from outside Central America. Deporting migrants to countries in South America, Asia, Africa and throughout the Caribbean is not only more costly but may be complicated by the fact that many of those — such as Cuba and China– are considered “recalcitrant” countries because they refuse to accept migrants designated for return, Putzel-Kavanaugh said. Those uncooperative nations stymied Trump in his first term, as well. The Migration Policy Institute reported that just 20% of migrants who received removal orders were actually deported in 2020.
“There are just some logistical constraints with carrying out those removal operations. They require a lot of resources, both to find people and then be able to apprehend them, but then also actually carry out their removals,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “So from start to finish, it is a huge logistical and resource-intensive endeavor.”
Trump has said cost is not an issue.
“It’s not a question of a price tag,” Trump said in a post-election interview with NBC News. “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
Economic Consequences
In 2023, Miller told the New York Times, “Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
But many economists disagree.
“Economists who have studied past large-scale deportations of immigrants from the United States have found those deportations to have been harmful to the U.S. economy and project that future large-scale deportations would also have negative impacts,” according to a review of the economic literature on the impact of mass deportations by Robert Lynch, professor emeritus of economics at Washington College, and Michael Ettlinger, the founding director of the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, in August. “Negative effects include lower national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and reduced employment and lower wages for citizens and authorized immigrants. The research finds that negative labor market consequences are found across income and pay levels. Economists anticipate that in the event of future mass deportations prices would rise and U.S. tax revenues would decline.”
Specifically, the authors wrote that researchers estimate that mass deportations would reduce the gross domestic product by 2.6% to 6.2% and the number of hours worked by as much as 3.6%.
Studies of the economic impact of past mass deportations “have consistently found that
deportation policies have not benefitted U.S.-born residents,” the authors wrote.
In a working paper released in September, the Peterson Institute for International Economics modeled two possible scenarios: one in which Trump deported 1.3 million people, and another in which he deported 8.3 million. Both are expected to lower U.S. GDP, reduce employment and increase inflation.
“The scenarios differ only by the degree of damage inflicted on people, households, firms, and the overall economy,” the authors of the paper wrote, saying the labor supply would be reduced by 0.8% or 5.1% under the two scenarios, respectively.
“The Trump campaign assumes that employers would simply replace the deported workers with native workers, but the historical record shows that employer behavior is far more complicated than that,” according to a PIIE story about the research on Sept. 26. “Past experience with deportations demonstrates that employers do not find it easy to replace such workers. Instead, they respond by investing in less labor-intensive technologies to sustain their businesses, or they simply decide not to expand their operations. The net result is fewer people employed in key business sectors like services, agriculture, and manufacturing. In addition, those unauthorized immigrants aren’t just workers—they’re consumers too. Deporting them means less demand for groceries, housing, services, and other household needs. This lower spending in turn reduces demand for workers in those sectors. That reduced demand for workers in all types of jobs outweighs the reduction of supply of unauthorized workers. Contrary to the Trump campaign’s assumption that deporting workers increases domestic employment, removing immigrants reduces jobs for other US workers.”
The researchers also warn, as did the authors of the literature review published by the University of New Hampshire, that mass deportations will spike inflation in the short term.
“On the whole, unauthorized immigrants act as complements for US-born workers rather than substitutes for them,” Chloe East, an associate professor in economics at the University of Colorado and a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution, told us via email. “My research has found that one of the last mass deportation episodes in the US, which deported about 400,000 people over 2008-2014, actually hurt the US labor market and job prospects for US-born workers. For every 100 people removed from the labor market because of deportations, 9 US-born people lost a job permanently.
“This is because when unauthorized immigrants are removed from the labor market, US-born people do not simply slot into the jobs left behind,” said East, who is also faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Instead, those jobs generally go away and this hurts job prospects for US-born people. As examples, think about the construction industry—when there are fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US to work as construction laborers, the demand for construction site managers—jobs held mostly by US-born people—go down. Similarly, when there are fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US to work as dishwashers at local restaurants, the demand for waiters and waitresses—jobs held mostly by US-born people—go down. Additionally, unauthorized immigrants help to stimulate consumer demand, and this helps to create jobs for everyone including US-born people.”
In Detroit on Oct. 18, Trump claimed that the “migrant invasion” under Biden is “devastating our great African American community” because “they’re taking their jobs.” He said people who immigrated illegally are “taking a lot of Hispanic jobs” as well.
“We don’t see strong evidence that even US-born people with the lowest levels of education are helped as a result of mass deportations,” East told us.
The economic disruption is true even when targeting criminals for deportation, East said.
“The policy I have analyzed is called Secure Communities and was intended to only deport people who were arrested and found to be unauthorized after their arrest,” East said. (Secure Communities was a federal program to facilitate removal of public safety and national security threats. Implemented during parts of the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump, it led to the removal of over 363,000 criminal aliens.) “However, even with this policy goal, the policy failed to target only criminals –17% of those deported were not convicted of any crime, 7% had a traffic violation as their most serious criminal conviction, and another 6% had an immigration violation as their most serious criminal conviction. And … this policy, even though it was supposed to be targeted, had large, negative impacts on the labor market.”
The American Immigration Council estimates that mass deportations would reduce the U.S. GDP by 4.2% to 6.8%.
“Mass deportations would cause significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector,” AIC wrote. “We estimate that nearly 14 percent of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented. Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure. As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs.”
In an interview with CNN on Nov. 13, Lawrence Summers, who was an economic adviser to then-President Barack Obama and treasury secretary under then-President Bill Clinton, warned that the sum of Trump’s plans, including for mass deportations, would cause “an inflation shock significantly greater than the one the country suffered in 2021.”
“I think every sensible American thinks we need to do more to secure our border,” Summers said. “But if you’re talking about deporting millions of people, that is an invitation to labor shortage and bottlenecks.”
Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, isn’t buying it.
“It’s hard to make the argument that if you removed 2% of the workforce it’s going to have some big effect on the overall economy,” Camarota said, particularly since most of the immigrant workers are in low-wage jobs. “You’re just not going to get some big economic drop from reducing lots of low-wage workers.”
It may have a significant short-term impact on some industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor, he said, such as construction or yard maintenance. He expects that to drive up wages in those industries, something he hopes will entice some U.S. citizens to rejoin the workforce.
Trump Said Similar Things Back in 2016
In 2015, Trump also talked about deporting all of the 10 million-plus immigrants in the country illegally and then “expediting” the return of the “good people.”
“In a Trump administration, all immigration laws will be enforced. As with any law enforcement activity, we will set priorities,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Arizona in 2016. “But, unlike this administration, no one will be immune or exempt from enforcement — and ICE and Border Patrol officers will be allowed to do their jobs. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation — that is what it means to have laws and to have a country.”
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are going make a determination at that [time],” Trump told “60 Minutes” in November 2016.
But the average annual number of deportations — defined as removals plus enforcement returns — went down under Trump compared with the number of deportations under Obama. They also dropped significantly in the first two years under Biden, but then dramatically increased and are on pace to match Trump’s deportation numbers. (In the first two years under Biden, when interior removals plummeted, the number of Title 42 expulsions soared. Trump began the use of Title 42, an emergency public health law that allowed the U.S. to turn away many immigrants at the border during the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase in the number of deportations under Biden began after Biden stopped the use of Title 42 in May 2023, when the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended.)
“After nearly four years in office, the president’s record on immigration—while remarkably faithful to his campaign agenda—did not keep up in at least one regard,” according to a report from the Migration Policy Institute near the end of Trump’s presidency. “Immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior during the Trump administration has lagged far behind the president’s 2016 electoral promises as well as the record of his predecessor, Barack Obama. In fact, the Trump administration deported only slightly more than one-third as many unauthorized immigrants from the interior during its first four fiscal years than did the Obama administration during the same timeframe.”
According to MPI, “the large number of deportations promised [by Trump] has remained elusive, mostly due to resistance from state and local officials who have advanced ‘sanctuary’ policies that limit cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
This time around, Trump has vowed that he “will cut federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions.” (Sanctuary jurisdictions are those that limit the degree to which local police cooperate with requests from federal authorities to detain and turn over unauthorized immigrants.) That’s sure to draw legal challenge. During his first term, Trump cut off access to some federal crime-fighting grants to cities and states with sanctuary policies. When some cities and states sued, a federal appeals court ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. That decision was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the appeal was withdrawn after Biden was elected and the Justice Department reversed the policy.
Putzel-Kavanaugh, of the Migration Policy Institute, warned that Trump’s efforts to stem illegal immigration may face the same headwinds Biden did. She said migration in recent years has become “kind of a hemispheric and a global phenomenon” that is unlikely to change, “though we may, we may see ebbs and flows kind of depending on what’s happening in the world.”
“I do think that many of the same challenges that the Biden administration has faced, the Trump administration is likely to face as well, including diversified nationalities, increases in families and more people sort of wanting protection,” she said. “It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen in terms of overall numbers. I think that in the next couple of months, we’ll certainly see an increase, and then once Trump comes into office, depending on what policies are put into place, we’ll likely see the similar patterns as we have before, which is sort of an initial decrease, and then it increases back up, and then maybe another decrease with another policy, and then numbers go back up. And that’s happened throughout the Biden administration too.”
Putzel-Kavanaugh also expects Trump to face numerous legal challenges to his plans, such as his vow to revive Title 42. Trump has said the new version would be based on claims that migrants carry other infectious diseases. (That’s disputed by some health experts. “There is no evidence to show that migrants are spreading disease,” Dr. Paul Spiegel, who directs the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, told NBC News. “That is a false argument that is used to keep migrants out.”)
Trump has also talked about ending DACA — which includes protections for qualified individuals who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children. And Trump has again vowed to end birthright citizenship, though as we have written, most legal scholars believe such a change would require a constitutional amendment.
In his 2023 interview with the New York Times, Miller said Trump anticipates lawsuits challenging all of Trump’s proposed changes, but Miller “portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a ‘blitz’ designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.”
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