Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans
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What are Donald Trump's mass-deportation plans?
He's promised the largest deportation in history — millions of people, potentially — And it starts on day one, according to Trump. Stephen Miller said the administration would A deportation policy on this scale would have enormous impact, not only on the lives of immigrants, but on their communities, on the U.S. economy, and much more. To understand what's really possible come January, I'm joined by staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who's the author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, a definitive account published this year of the immigration crisis in America. Jonathan, before we get into the prospect of the Trump administration and a potential deportation, I want to ask you if you think looking back on the now completed campaign,
If the Democratic Party got immigration wrong, if the Biden administration ignored it for too long, as has been the critique all along from the Republicans. I definitely think the Democrats and Biden specifically miscalculated in thinking that if they put their heads down and didn't talk about this, the issue would somehow pass or it would kind of dissolve in the general ether. And so they didn't really. Why would they do that? Well, it's tough news for Democrats all the time because the Republicans have a very simple, coherent message. You know, it's plain and it's forceful and it's pithy. And that is, you know, shut down the border. Fewer people should enter the country. You know, America first. It's the whole litany. Whereas Democrats have this issue of needing to communicate something more nuanced, balancing a kind of humaneness with pragmatism at the border and beyond. And that's always been a hard message for Democrats.
And they've always kind of toggled between trying to seem tough and trying to do things that at least are a little bit different than the Republicans, even though basically the tools in their arsenal aren't all that different. That said, the Biden administration, to my mind, made two sort of major policy miscalculations. The first was clinging to a Trump era policy for too long. It ostensibly was very tough. What it did was it allowed the government to summarily expel anyone who showed up at the southern border without giving them any real sense of due process or an opportunity to present claims for asylum. It seems like it would be an effective way of clearing the border when you need to for the federal government.
But in fact, it actually had a series of counterproductive effects because the government was expelling people en masse without any sort of orderly system around it. People were trying to cross multiple times. It didn't really stand up the asylum system or any of the border processing mechanisms that the Trump administration in its first term had sabotaged. And so it allowed the Biden administration to have a kind of – illusion of control over the border when, in fact, the circumstances were really spiraling out of their control. That was the first thing. And the second thing, and the one that I actually think ultimately was more definitive in terms of how it impacted the election, was Governor Abbott, Greg Abbott in Texas, busing tens of thousands of recently arrived migrants to blue cities and states across the country. And DeSantis as well. DeSantis did it as well. Each one wanted to outdo the other.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What are Donald Trump's mass-deportation plans?
1:18–4:37
2
Who is Stephen Miller and what is his role?
4:37–7:06
3
What are the implications of mass deportation?
7:06–10:32
4
How does immigration policy affect the economy?
10:32–19:53
5
What are the potential legal issues with military involvement in deportations?
19:53–22:47
6
How does Operation Wetback relate to current deportation plans?
22:47–26:16
7
What are the realities of undocumented immigrants in America?
26:16–31:15