What would Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ plan look like?

Perhaps the biggest potential hurdle a second Trump administration could face is in the actual deportation of such a large amount of people. In addition to its own set of legal complications, identifying and removing undocumented immigrants would require a major boost in funding and personnel, plus cooperation from state, local, and foreign governments. None of those are going to be easy to achieve on their own.

Krikorian said that the administration would begin by “ramping up the removal of criminals” — something Trump has discussed often on the campaign trail — and continue by revoking or not renewing parole grants. Trump has also vowed to “end all sanctuary cities” if elected president again, and Krikorian told Semafor that cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities are another obstacle to deportation. Trump deported fewer people than President Obama in part due to widespread local non-cooperation.

Democratic administrations have formally prioritized deportations of criminals in allocating resources. Immigration hardliners hope Trump could make some further gains by creating an atmosphere of fear among undocumented workers — even if the kinds of sweeping national crackdowns he envisions aren’t immediately possible, an uptick in worksite enforcement might make employers and employees alike more hesitant about their status.

“Making it unsustainable to stay here and to work here is going to be one of the keys to carrying out their plans,” according to Krikorian.

Meissner also pointed out that Trump will need to expand his resources beyond ICE, recruiting other federal agencies, local law enforcement, the National Guard, and potentially the military to expel migrants. This, she said, will require persuading organizations “to change their missions” — and even with ICE, Trump would “have to make a tradeoff decision about using those resources in the interior of the country” compared to at the border.

“I think that there would be inevitably, very, very significant pushback, because all of those other entities have important missions and missions that are with appropriations from Congress that are designated for that work, or missions from their state and local jurisdictions that are funded not to do that kind of work,” Meissner told Semafor. “So that’s a whole area of complexity that cannot happen with just a snap of a finger.”

Stephen Miller, a close Trump confidant who served in his first administration and helped craft Trump’s immigration policies, told The New York Times last year that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, which is an exception to a law that restricts using armed forces as law enforcement, called the Posse Comitatus Act.

The building of large detention centers is another hurdle the administration will need to grapple with — Krikorian noted that this would “be very expensive” and require “a significant investment, at least for the short or medium term,” but argued it will serve as a deterrent long-term. Congress could be resistant to Trump’s plans, though. He ended up — controversially, even within his own party — rerouting defense funds to build parts of a border wall after struggling to gain their approval. It may take similar emergency measures that test the limits of his power to fund other priorities, which also could create additional court challenges.

Miller told the Times that they’d likely build “holding facilities” on open Texas land close to the border, directing the military to construct them. Meissner, meanwhile, predicted that “the most likely target for those kinds of camps will be military bases,” which were used temporarily to bring Afghans into the country during the 2021 withdrawal.

“The Defense Department will have a big problem with that, so he would have to have a very compliant Secretary of Defense,” she said.

Cardenas brought up another challenge to Trump’s plan, arguing that his efforts would be detrimental economically to the U.S., which has relied on immigrant workers to power the post-pandemic recovery. While Miller has argued that this would actually be a good thing for the country by reducing competition for native-born workers, research suggests the additional workers come with a number of economic benefits, including holding down prices.

“Having a mass deportation plan is terrible for the United States,” Cardenas said. “Entire industries depend on the undocumented population in this country.”

While everyone, including Trump’s aides, recognize the hurdles facing them, the general consensus among experts is that the former president has a more experienced team this time around — a fact that could help him more efficiently implement broad swaths of his plan. The more conservative-leaning Supreme Court could also be more friendly to his goals.

“Alongside this effort, you have people like Stephen Miller, [former Trump administration immigration policy official] Gene Hamilton, and a number of other Trump officials that were with him when he was at the White House. And again, now they’re eager to continue advancing their agenda,” according to Cardenas. “There’s a lot of levers that he can pull in our government.”

Politically, Trump may have a greater mandate to pursue immigration crackdowns than in his first term. Then, Democrats were confident opposing policies like child separation as human-rights abuses, defending asylum seekers from attacks, and deriding efforts to build a border wall as folly. This time, both the Biden administration and Harris are emphasizing more hawkish policies as polls show voters have shifted their priorities in the same direction. The bipartisan bill backed by Harris would add more resources to the border, including barriers, while also limiting asylum claims. Biden, meanwhile, is boasting of reduced crossings after initiating his own executive orders designed to make it harder for migrants to make such claims at the border.