Donald Trump’s Mass Deportations Would Cost Billions and Take Years to Process

On Sunday night, Donald Trump scaled back his campaign promise to forcibly deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., telling 60 Minutes, "What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.”

But the new number is hardly reassuring. To put that in perspective, 2.5 million people were deported during the first six years of President Obama’s tenure — far more than were deported by any other president and almost more than all previous presidents combined.

 "For many of us, Trump’s America was already here,” Marisa Franco, an Arizona-based community organizer and director of the #Not1More anti-deportation campaign, told a gathering of activists shortly after Trump’s victory.

And while the president-elect’s comments, rhetoric, and choice of advisers, have fueled panic among immigrant communities across the country, many are quick to point out that he is only going to exacerbate a broken system that’s already been defined by rogue enforcement agencies and rampant abuse for years.

"Obama built a horrible machine already,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with Detention Watch Network, a group that fights immigration detention and deportations nationwide. "Trump will just take it, and take it to a much more horrifying level.” 

In fact, what Trump is proposing is not very different from what has already been happening under the Obama administration, which has prioritized the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions.  But there simply aren’t two to three million of them. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of undocumented people with criminal records is closer to 820,000, and even then many of those people are not the "rapists” and "criminals” Trump would have us believe but are guilty instead of "status crimes,” like driving without a license in states that won’t allow undocumented people to get one, or entering the country illegally.

Until the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo calling on enforcement agencies to prioritize the deportation of individuals posing a "threat” to national security and public safety, only 59 percent of those deported had been convicted of crimes, and even fewer of felonies. Since then, the record number of deportations under President Obama has dipped somewhat — but Trump’s repeated commitment to ramp up enforcement has many immigrant rights advocates fear that the memo’s common sense provisions might be among the first to go under the new regime.

"I have no doubt that they’ll ramp up enforcement,” Wendy Feliz, communications director at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept. "It seems likely that the memo will be struck and the new administration will cast as wide a net as possible to increase removal numbers.”

With fast, mass deportations come worse conditions in the already abysmal detention centers where so many immigrants are warehoused, and inevitable threats to due process — something everyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status, is legally entitled to. The ACLU estimated that to fulfill his promise, Trump would need to quickly build nine more federal detention facilities, to make room for some 100,000 beds. And unless he’s going to pour massive resources into immigration courts, he’ll only exacerbate a backlog that’s already over 500,000 cases, the highest ever.

"There need to be hearings before judges, there’s a removal system; there’s a process for deporting people,” said Feliz, noting that immigration courts are already dealing with a record-high backlog of cases and shortage of judges. "It’s not as fast and straightforward as Trump has indicated.”