By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
One of the first things President-elect Donald Trump has promised under his second reign is mass deportations of the estimated 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States—and one of the ways he has promised to do it is under the now-infamous Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used nationwide during World War II (WWII) to forcibly imprison thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans in incarceration camps across the United States.
But can he do this? And is this just a distraction tactic from what the administration might really be doing in the background?
The answer to the first question is: Yes—but not very easily and not cheaply. For one, this requires both staffing and infrastructure, neither of which the United States currently has, said American Immigration Council’s executive director, Jeremy Robbins, during Ethnic Media Services Nov. 15 briefing on what a Trump win could mean for immigrants.
“They simply do not have the capacity. One, we don’t know what people are. And then it is extremely expensive, and you need a lot of people that [they] do not currently have on staff to do that,” Robbins said. “Then, when you pick people up, you’ve got to hold them while you figure out whether they should be here.”
To answer the second question requires the media to “have a line of sight on what’s actually happening,” said Elizabeth Taufa, policy attorney and strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Like his 2016 administration, Trump’s 2024 campaign has dealt in misinformation and outright lies. A responsible media will need to cut through that noise, Taufa said.
“In addition to the fear and the chaos that we hear about very consistently from this administration, from the campaign, I think there is a certain amount of deflection and distraction that they’re trying to engage in talking about the ridiculous cabinet appointees,” Taufa said. “They’re doing something behind the scenes that we really need to pay attention to. … We have to ask one more question and say, ‘What is it that they don’t want us to look at?’”
And it does come down to reality, no matter what Trump claims.
FILE – President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Howell, Mich. on Aug. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
For starters, he has claimed that he can and will deport 13 million people, but the reality is that the United States has the capacity for a fraction of that, about 50,000. That means the administration would have to spend even more money building facilities—and then it’s not even a surefire deportation. The courts have to agree, and it takes about five years to figure out whether someone should get asylum, Robbins said.
But the backlog of cases stands at more than 1 million cases already, Robbins said, and even if someone is cleared for deportation, this does not mean that their countries of origin would take them back.
“So all of that, if you were going to do it all at once, would cost about $315 billion,” Robbins said. “And if you’re trying to deport a million people per year, it would be about $88 billion a year. It’s about almost a trillion dollars over a decade.”
So why threaten this, in the first place?
One reason, said Greg Chen, Senior Director of Government Relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, is fear and intimidation.
“They are counting on the fact that they can instill fear in communities, and that’s already happening now. We have attorneys who are calling because people who have legal status are even afraid that they’ll be rounded up, as well, because they’ll just be profiled,” Chen said, his words recalling what happened to Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. “Those are legitimate concerns in this new environment we are in.”
And even so, pushing this through would be disastrous for the country’s economy.
“We are going to see devastation across the country of businesses and industries in just about every economic sector. That is something that is not going to be good for the country,” Chen said. “I would say that would not be a smart policy for them to be pushing forward, since the economy was apparently the most important thing to voters.”
Most American adults are already familiar with a conservative estimate of how bad a move deporting 13 million immigrants would get. They already got a taste of it in 2008’s Great Recession, when millions of American families lost their homes and livelihoods.
“By conservative estimates, deporting 13 million people who are over 4% of the workforce and working in really critical industries would have between a 4.2% and 6.8% negative impact on our … gross domestic product,” Robbins said. “That’s in line with the Great Recession.”
“Conversely,” he continued, “the last time there was a big bill in Congress in 2013 to reform our immigration laws and give people a path to legal status, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that it would have a positive impact of $900 billion over 20 years, because it would bring in more taxpayers, more consumers and grow our economy.”
There is another hurdle for agents to clear, too, Chen said: There are limits to how federal agents—which is what Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are—can act, and there are limits to those staffing resources.
“The kinds of things the new administration has been saying they’re planning to do, including mobilizing National Guard who are not trained on immigration law—that’s going to result in more violations of existing federal legal requirements, both in the immigration law space, such as proper screenings for asylum, as well as for civil rights harassment,” Chen said. “We’re likely to see local law enforcement or other actors violate U.S. law, and I think that will create a greater environment of chaos within our communities.”
This includes businesses, Chen said, whose owners will also be penalized for employing undocumented immigrants, thus further hurting the economy.
But it’s not just the economy that would suffer from mass deportations, Taufa said. People would lose family members, fellow religious organization members, co-workers—even kindergarten classmates.
“It looks like kids that aren’t going to school, because their parents are afraid of being deported. It looks like shortages of healthcare workers, because people either move to states that are a little bit safer or they are removed from the country,” Taufa said. “It looks like fewer teachers. There are a lot of folks here on temporary status like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) who are teachers. We are already facing a teacher shortage.”
“It’s not just the fact that [the Trump administration] can’t afford to do this,” Taufa continued. “It’s the unraveling of the threads of our American communities. This is going to hit rural communities a lot harder than it is going to hit urban communities.”
One major legal hurdle the Trump administration would face in ending TPS and DACA is literally constitutional: The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
“The case law is exceptionally clear on it, dating back to the 19th century in the case of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898,” Robbins said. “So, you would need one of two things to happen: Either you would need a constitutional amendment and you’d need two-thirds of the States to do that, or you would need a drastic change in [United States] Supreme Court jurisprudence, where the Supreme court would overrule the case from 1898.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Robbins continued. “And there are a lot of folks that are trying hard to do that. The president could not do it unilaterally, nor could Congress do it without a constitutional amendment. But that is a huge aim.”