Former President Donald Trump is promising “mass deportation” — and Republicans in Congress have been quick to support the promise, even if they’re unsure how such an effort would work.
“You’ll have to ask the president,” Sen. Ron Johnson said when NOTUS asked last week what that sort of deportation policy would look like.
When NOTUS asked Rep. Troy Nehls a similar question — how the government would go about getting a large number of undocumented people out of the country — the Texas Republican provided a simple answer: “One at a time.”
The idea of a “mass deportation” is difficult to pin down. It’s become a rallying cry on the right, but getting details into how the government would potentially deport tens of millions of people is much more difficult. Whether or not it’s realistic depends largely on how people interpret the meaning.
“There’s all these comments on, mass deportation is gonna be, you know, grabbing all these people who are still in their legal process,” Sen. James Lankford told NOTUS. “That’s not gonna happen because, again, a court’s gonna stop it, and the Trump administration has been through this before. They know it.”
“No one really knows what it looks like,” Lankford added. “I just know what a court would stop and what a court wouldn’t stop.”
And yet, because no one knows what it would look like, it’s been easy for Trump allies to endorse the idea without having to address some of the more brutal details, like family separation policies. The lack of details has also allowed immigration advocates to paint a scary picture.
They ask how the government could go about finding undocumented people and figuring out if they’re in the country legally without a huge increase in law enforcement, without the need to prove citizenship for everyday activities and without using data and surveillance to peer into the lives of Americans.
Again, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to have an answer.
“I suppose that we don’t get in front of a presidential campaign on that and let them announce what their plan is,” Rep. August Pfluger said in response to a question about why more Republicans haven’t talked about Trump’s deportation platform.
Rep. Andrew Clyde had a similar answer: “I’ll leave that up to the president. I think he’s very capable.”
The Trump campaign has set up some big promises on immigration reform, and many Republicans have been more than happy to campaign on those promises.
While Republicans have sharply criticized President Joe Biden over his handling of the border, deportations and expulsions have reached levels not seen in decades — and it may be difficult for Trump to even repeat those numbers.
Either way, if mass deportation is taken to follow Trump’s platform, his plan is likewise short on specifics. What is known is that his ideas would require massive amounts of money, huge shifts in resources and major wins in court — all while Democrats inside and outside of Congress challenge him every step of the way.
The GOP platform said Trump would “halt all releases of Illegal Aliens into the interior.” That policy alone would require a significant expansion of facilities to hold migrants. The increase in money needed to build and keep the facilities running would be in addition to the money needed to, as Trump has also promised, “complete the Border Wall.”
The GOP platform said the Trump administration would move deployed soldiers from overseas to the border and shift “massive portions” of federal law enforcement to work on the issue, though it’s unclear what departments would be raided for this expanded force.
The GOP platform also said Trump would reinstate “remain in Mexico” — which requires the cooperation of the Mexican government — and “end the child trafficking crisis by returning all trafficked children to their families in their Home Countries immediately,” which would require verifying that the child was trafficked, finding their relatives back home, paying for a flight to get them back home, getting their home country to accept the flight and paying for a safe place to keep them while they’re in the U.S.
“I’m not sure the mechanics of how it’ll be pulled off,” Rep. Michael Cloud said. “We’ve seen President Trump promise and deliver before. He has a much better record than most people who’ve entered that office.”
“From what I understand, he will give the illegals a real reason why they need to come forward, and a real reason why they have to go back,” Rep. Ralph Norman said. “The cost of this is going to be astronomical, but the cost of leaving them here is astronomical, and America should have never had to do that.”
Rep. Chip Roy echoed the assertion that dealing with the situation at the border would be cheaper in the long run.
“It’s gonna be cheaper than the welfare state that we’re creating,” he said. “We can just send the bill to Joe Biden.”
While most Republicans didn’t seem to have a clear plan for how Trump would pull off his ambitious deportation plan, lots of lawmakers had ideas about where to start.
Some said the country needs to crack down on stopping undocumented people from working so they’ll “self-deport.” Several others mentioned backlogs in asylum cases and delays in getting migrants who could be legally deported back home, which could be alleviated with more staff that Congress could approve in legislation. Others mentioned starting with those who came into contact with the justice system, making sure to deport those who had gotten in trouble with the law.
On the logistics of what to do with those countries who refuse to take deportees back, some lawmakers, again, put their faith in Trump.
“If the countries that we deport them to, their home countries, won’t take them, I think the president has shown that he has the wherewithal to leverage the power of the presidency to make them take them,” Clyde said.
Following Trump’s previous term, activists have raised concerns over whether such deportation efforts can be conducted humanely. Family separation under Trump became controversial as people became aware of children kept in detention without their parents. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency still faces hundreds of sexual assault allegations, and ICE was consistently called out for its concerning detention conditions for children and adults.
GOP lawmakers weren’t concerned.
“If they can ride on a bus and an airplane in our country, they can ride on one out. That is humane,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said last week.
“What happens to an American citizen when they break the law and they get convicted?” Clyde asked. “What happens to their kids? We’re gonna treat illegal aliens better than we treat our own citizens when our own citizens break the law and go to jail?”
“I’m sorry. But you’re gonna have family separation,” Clyde continued. “Why? We do it to our citizens here.”
Still, Clyde insisted Congress could meet the challenges humanely.
“It’s up to the Congress to do the job, and to do it appropriately, responsibly, and let the picture paint itself,” Clyde said. “The left will fearmonger and try and paint the worst picture possible. That just is not going to happen.”
—
Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Haley Byrd Wilt, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.