‘Largest deportation effort in American history’: Donald Trump alludes to extreme cruelty against immigrants

Donald Trump has deeply troubling plans for his upcoming tenure in office. One of the most disturbing of which is his campaign promise of the “largest deportation effort in American history,” a drastic measure that he threatened to deploy against undocumented immigrants on American soil.

It’s far from the first time that Trump and his cronies have taken aim at immigrants. In his first term as president, he began construction on a wall across the nation’s southern border and enacted travel bans against counties with high Muslim populations, effectively barring any practitioners of the Islamic faith from entering the United States. During his campaign for his second term, he and his backers spread virulent falsehoods about supposed criminal activity performed by immigrants, the most ludicrous of which was the flat-out debunked claim that Haitian immigrants had taken to eating dogs and cats in Ohio.

While Trump hasn’t shared any details about how he’d go about his mass deportation plan (he isn’t exactly a “details” kind of guy in the first place), he said that it would come with “no price tag” in an interview on CNN. Translation: he’s willing to spend whatever astronomical sum of taxpayer dollars it could cost to enact those deportations. In this case, “astronomical” is far from hyperbole. It was the exact adjective employed by ICE Director Adam Blair to describe the estimated total cost of the deportations.

According to a recent government estimate, there are just shy of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States as of January 1st, 2022. During Trump’s first term in office, his administration was responsible for 935,089 deportations, almost triple the amount that took place under Biden. A former ICE director under Trump had chilling words to describe the nearly one million deportations that took place under Trump, and how that number would compare to the total amount that would occur during Trump’s upcoming term: “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Acting ICE director Patrick J. Lechleitner is less optimistic. According to an interview with CNN, deporting 11 million people would be an extremely expensive logistical nightmare. “It’s not only putting them on planes and flying them, which is expensive, we got to have airplanes,” he said. “We also have to deal with host nations. We have to get travel documents, we have to do all the logistics involved with that.” According to urban planning expert Abigail Andrews, the task is nigh impossible. “There is no logistical way to track down 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants with the ICE employees they currently have.”

Andrews is far from alone in her skepticism. According to experts, the total cost of Trump’s mass deportation plan could exceed $315 billion. That’s over three times the amount that the federal government allocates for its education budget each year. In all likelihood, Trump’s mass deportation plan is just another campaign promise that he will not be able to afford to keep as the sitting president.

While Trump’s master “mass deportation” plans may never come to complete fruition, they were probably never intended to. The Trump campaign has used immigrants as a political football to drum up fear and hostility from its Republican base, using a combination of xenophobic rhetoric and “pet-eating” lies to play upon the anxieties of voters. “Bloodthirsty criminals,” “the most violent people on Earth,” “animals,” “stone-cold killers,” the “worst people,” the “enemy from within.” These are all terms that Trump has used to describe immigrant populations across his campaign. Now that he’ll be president again, it may become even worse.