While Trump talked about mass deportations during his 2016 campaign he only managed to expel several hundred thousand people per year, which is similar to the number of deportations during other recent administrations. Now he’s making plans to enact mass deportations on a scale never seen in this country, with the goal of booting out millions of people each year.
This would involve scouring the country for undocumented immigrants — including people who have lived in the U.S. for many years — detaining them in massive new camps, and swiftly deporting them, as the New York Times reported:
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
During a trip to the southern border on February 29, Trump said local police will be a key part of this effort.
“We have to deport a lot of people, and they have to start immediately,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “It’s going to be the local police are going to turn them over, and we’re going to have to move them back to their country.”
Former Trump aide Stephen Miller bragged about Trump’s immigration plans to the Times, describing them as a “blitz” designed to be enacted without the need for any substantive new legislation.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
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