When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he vowed to build a wall to seal the border and keep criminals from entering the U.S. This campaign season, his immigration agenda has a new focus: a mass deportation program unlike anything the country has seen. His party’s platform, ratified at the convention in Milwaukee, promises the “largest deportation effort in American history,” and immigration was the theme of Tuesday’s gathering. There were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022, and more than eight out of 10 have been in the U.S. for more than a decade. Trump gave the total during last month's debate as 18 million, which is unsubstantiated. Fleeing political and economic turmoil, migrants from countries like Venezuela have crossed the border in record numbers during the Biden administration. Trump and the GOP platform have made broad declarations but offered scant details about their intended operation, says the New York Times. The former president has suggested that any undocumented immigrant is subject to removal.
The party platform states that “the most dangerous criminals” would be prioritized. It also said: “The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens back home and removing those who have violated our laws.” The consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term. “It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years,” said Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. It would cost “billions of dollars. It would probably take 20 years. It would cause the economy to shrink,” she said. It would require an enormous influx of resources throughout the enforcement system and billions in new appropriations. “Even if he had a Congress willing to enact dramatic statutory reforms and appropriate the tens of billions required, there is no way such a system could be fully functional within a four-year period,” said John Sandweg, a homeland security official in the Obama administration.
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