Have you ever really thought about what the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants would look like?
It’s item No. 2 on Donald Trump’s Agenda 47, inhumane and written in all caps: “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST MASS DEPORTATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY. The whole premise, of course, is a sly wink: White voters, and probably Black voters, are meant to understand that this does not mean us. It’s them, people who speak accented English, perform low-skill, low-wage work and definitely don’t live in your neighborhood.
That’s a fantasy.
A serious attempt at the largest mass deportation in the nation’s history would require an unprecedented level of law enforcement intrusion into our lives that is utterly foreign to most Americans, even those in overpoliced communities.
Especially here in Michigan, where the federal government considers the entire state a “border zone” in which the federal government claims expanded powers of enforcement that circumvent some constitutional protections.
And, despite the us vs. them narrative embedded in the pitch for mass deportation, it would touch the lives of all Michiganders, whether your neighborhood is rich or poor, middle or working class, white, Black or brown.
Delegates holds “Mass deportation now” signs on Day 3 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 17, 2024.
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‘A police state’
In Michigan, around 700,000 people, about 7%, are foreign born. A much larger group are their children or descendants. Most, of course, are citizens or legal residents.
How would government officials driving mass deportation make these determinations?
“Immigrants do not live in camps by themselves. They live in cities, and it is almost impossible to tell who is who,” said longtime immigration attorney Peter Antone, a partner at Farmington Hills-based Antone, Casagrande and Adwers P.C. “If it’s implemented, it will require turning many of our cities to something similar to a police state.”
Think police checkpoints. Raids, wherever the government suspects undocumented immigrants might be — schools, churches, businesses. The redirection of law enforcement at every level to set up checkpoints and carry out raids. Churches and mosques trying to hide targeted immigrants. Detention camps. Citizens caught up in sweeps. Few guardrails that could stop any of it from happening.
“We’re talking about a ‘show me your papers’ society,” said Susan Reed, attorney director of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
That’s how Stephen Miller, the darkest timeline strategist from Trump’s first administration, explained it to the New York Times last year.
Trump’s second-term deportation scheme, Miller explained, wouldn’t require significant new legislation, but could be achieved through revising existing statutes to unleash a “spectacular migration crackdown” in a “blitz” impossible for immigrant-rights lawyers to effectively challenge in the courts — now stocked with Trump-appointed judges. He’d consider invoking the Insurrection Act to tap the U.S. military for immigration enforcement, and expand the use of expedited removal proceedings to deport immigrants without hearings, or appeals.
Trump, for his part, believes 11 million is an undercount. It’s more likely, he says, that there are 15 million or 21 million undocumented workers in America.
It’s impossible to imagine, even in the abstract. When you consider that there are about 9 million people in Michigan and about 18 million in the New York City metropolitan area, that ought to help you understand the improbability of finding, much less deporting, that many people.
And yet a startling majority of Americans tell pollsters they support mass deportation; recent surveys have found that even a majority of Hispanic voters approve.
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Don’t ask me, ask a cop
“It would involve — and I’m speculating here — every level of law enforcement, from state, federal, local, it would involve the National Guard, every form of state and fed government would have to be utilized,” said Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson. (Swanson, to be clear, hadn’t contemplated anything of the sort until I called, but was sporting enough to talk it through in an interview. If asked to undertake such an effort, he told me, “I don’t know if I would do it.”)
Trying to envision the scale of such an operation, Swanson couldn’t help but think of the NFL draft, which drew an elbow-to-elbow crowd to downtown Detroit — a comparatively small 750,000 people. Or the difficulty his department faces of finding and felony suspects with outstanding arrest warrants.
“In Genesee County, if there was a list of 100 people, and we needed to find them and round them up, that would be impossible,” he said.
For that sort of broad effort, Swanson said, “You would see other assets being deployed that would shock the conscience of the average person walking down the street.”
And that’s just beginning: “How do you move those people? It’s a population larger than the state of Michigan.”
Transporting an inmate, he said, takes seven to 10 days, requires security and, depending on distance, housing along the way. “Moving people is not like moving product.”
“On top of that, 911 calls are continuing to go out,” he said. “We’re not able to fill 16 positions at the sheriff’s office, between jail and patrol, and we still have a city and county to police … Where are you going to add this extra layer … to do this? You’d have to bring in the military.
“Military operations rounding people up? That’s not a sight America wants to behold.”
It’s happened before, and it wasn’t pretty
America’s last mass deportation effort, the reprehensibly named “Operation Wetback,” began in 1954, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, and deported about a million people. It’s been a reference point for Trump in stump speeches. Before that, there was “Mexican repatriation,” a Depression-era program that sent 1.8 million people of Mexican descent to Mexico, roughly 60% of whom were American citizens. Those numbers are just a fraction of what Trump and Miller envision.
If you’re relying on the constitution to stop mass deportation, consider that the courts didn’t block either as unconstitutional, said Reed.
And consider this, too, Reed said: On the spot, most U.S. citizens can’t prove their citizenship.
“Most people would have a hard time doing that by the side of the road, or coming out of the YMCA.”
The immigration system operates in a constant state of backlog, Reed said, that leaves migrants’ status pending for years at a time. Hearings are routinely scheduled one and two years out, because the system is inadequately resourced and staffed, at every level — including judges. One analysis found that the U.S. Congress spends $24 on Immigration and Customs Enforcement for every $1 spent on immigration courts.
In the mass deportation scheme, Reed said, “There’s no plan to determine who has the legal right to be here. That’s pretty evident.”
There’s another group, Antone said, of people who are not here illegally, but whose status is unresolved.
“They’re waiting for their status to be corrected, and are in limbo. It’s very, very difficult for immigration services to recognize who is who, and who falls into which category,” he said. “So you might have people who are entitled to relief falling through the cracks, their family harmed or deported, when their status could have been resolved, and become legal.”
Could it really happen?
I spend a lot of time thinking about policy, reading policy, working to understand how policy would impact our lives and prosperity.
It’s hard to take any policy proposal voiced by Trump seriously. He’s got a knack for voicing the zeitgeist of his voting base, articulating red-meat, feel-good proposals that rally attendees can cheer, while offering few details.
Then there’s Stephen Miller, who is as serious as Trump is not.
That’s the space mass deportation occupies: Somewhere between Americans’ overblown fears of the menacing other, and more-pragmatic worries about tough economies and labor market competition. Voters probably aren’t supposed to take it too seriously.
It’s probably all nonsense, red meat campaign rhetoric that not even Miller and Trump could seriously propose, much less implement.
But what if it’s not?
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: OPINION: Trump’s mass deportation would change life for MIchigan, US
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Publish date : 2024-09-22 23:02:00
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