Former President Donald Trump’s plans for the presidency pose threats to many Americans. Among the hardest hit would be a demographic who can’t even vote — undocumented immigrants.
For nearly a decade, Trump has denounced people who enter the United States illegally with derogatory and dehumanizing language.
“The day I take the oath of office, the migrant invasion of our country ends,” he said during his Madison Square Garden rally last week.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation in American history,” Trump said at a rally in last year.
He threatens mass law enforcement deployment, workplace raids and detention camps. He often praises Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” a plan that deported 1 million and left 88 dead in the Mexican heat with no water in the 1950s.
In a November interview with the New York Times, Stephen Miller — Trump’s former senior advisor who designed his 2016 travel ban on people from five Muslim majority countries, as well as his policies separating migrant children and parents at the border — warned, “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”
“The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening,” Miller said.
Trump has been promising this since his first presidential campaign. “We got to move ‘em out,” Trump said, referring to 11 million undocumented immigrants in a 2015 CNN interview.
So why shouldn’t we believe him?
Expert after expert after expert has said Trump’s mass deportation plans are simply not possible. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council said in a press call last month, they aren’t plausible not just in four years, but not even in as many as 42.
It’s not only that it would cost taxpayers about $88 billion to deport 1 million immigrants in a year or even that the U.S. GDP would shrink by about 4-7%, back to Great Recession numbers. Certainly, he promises serious action and has followed through on some — but experts say Trump’s intention to deport every undocumented immigrant is unattainable.
But his goal may be more sinister.
Just as he did in his first term in office, Trump may order a record-breaking raid to induce fear among immigrants across America and tee up the mass suppression of migrant workers’ voices, labor analysts say.
“Most undocumented people in this country are not going to get deported, but they’re going to watch that happen on TV,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, the director of communications for United Farm Workers (UFW), said. “It’s going to be all over Univision, and they’re going to think, ‘Oh, well, I better keep my head down [about] the fact that I’m experiencing wage theft.’”
In the 922-page “Mandate for Leadership,” an outline for the next conservative presidency, the Heritage Foundation echoes Trump’s speaking points: Give ICE whatever it needs to deport all undocumented immigrants across the country.
Deporting 1 million migrants in one year would require more than 30,000 new hires, according to an October report by the American Immigration Council (AIC), making ICE the biggest law enforcement agency in the country.
Though Trump’s campaign disavows any ties to Project 2025′s game plan, the former president keynoted the Foundation’s 2022 dinner and said the “great group” of his allies and aides would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement … will do.”
To achieve what Trump envisions would cost another $6.2 billion for ICE to hire enough officers, according to the AIC.
“ICE has its hands full” as is, Niels Frenzen, director of the USC Gould School of Law’s Immigration Clinic, said.
“With people coming onto the radar … through contact with the criminal justice system or through border crossings — apprehensions, at or near the border — they are pretty much working at capacity,” Frenzen added.
The AIC estimates about 13.3 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. today. To estimate the cost of Trump’s deportation plans, the AIC offered two scenarios: deport all migrants at once, or deport 1 million per year in what Reichlin-Melnick called “a decade-long project.” The AIC broke up the costs into four categories: arrests, detention, legal processing and deportation.
All at once, it’s $315 billion. Per year, it’s $88 billion, or almost a trillion over 11 years with inflation.
It’s probably not going to happen.
“It’s purely a campaign fever dream,” Roberto Suro, a USC emeritus professor of journalism and public policy, wrote in October.
Even in his first go-around, Trump talked big and delivered little. Though arrests and deportations slightly rose, they never came close to pre-Barack Obama times — and the U.S. undocumented population stayed relatively the same.
“They don’t have the resources, or the capacity, or the structures to actually carry out mass deportations,” De Loera-Brust said.
“They’ll try to say that they’re doing it by conducting some very large, very ugly raids in certain communities,” De Loera-Brust said. “A hammer will come down.”
And that’s exactly what Trump did.
In his presidency, Trump delivered the largest immigration raid in U.S. history on a small town of about 4000 called Morton, Mississippi, arresting 680 mostly Latino workers at chicken processing plants. Soon after, families disrupted by the raids took their children out of school and relied on community donations to eat. The county voted 60% for Trump in 2020.
The fear that Trump created, and the misleading narratives he’s led in his presidency and candidacy about the danger that migrants pose to the U.S., cause devastating problems, workers and analysts say.
Last September, a carrot farm worker in Bakersfield, California was hit and killed by a truck in the field. A farm worker who witnessed the death was told by management to ignore it, and carry on picking.
“‘You’re undocumented, you shouldn’t say anything,’” farm owners said to workers, Al Jazeera reported. “There is a sense of fear and terror that I and other workers feel when we hear talks of mass deportations and so on.” In Kern County, where the worker was killed, 54% voted for Trump over Biden.
Instead of reporting abusive conditions that undocumented farm workers experience, “immigrant communities will self-harm out of fear,” De Loera-Brust said. “Forget unionizing, forget asking for higher wages, forget the fact that they’re not giving [farm workers] shade or water during these intense heat waves.”
“That’s the way most undocumented people I’ve talked to lived during the Trump administration,” De Loera-Brust said. “They just didn’t want to rock the boat, didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want to lift up their voices. But the economic point is that: What will farmers for Trump get out of it?”
Here’s the catch: saying Trump can’t pull off mass deportations but will continue to sow seeds of fear in migrant workers might suggest a vote for Trump is not so dangerous.
Farmworkers’ advocates, however, say the abuse migrant workers experience is already devastating. Under a second Trump presidency, they fear it will get worse. Almost half of all farm workers are undocumented. When abuse is up, but reports go down, De Loera-Brust said that means voting farm owners can keep farm workers’ wages low with few repercussions.
To Suyapa Portillo Villeda, a scholar and professor of labor and migration studies at Pitzer College, Trump’s misleading narratives raise a dangerous question: “What’s a deserving immigrant? Who’s a good immigrant? Who’s a bad immigrant?”
She argues the undocumented workers who contribute to America’s global share of the agricultural economy and sustain grocery stores across the country are deserving.
“Across the U.S., migrant and seasonal workers are the reason that American farms can provide the breadth of produce they do,” Portillo Villeda said. “We have year-round access to fruits and vegetables. That’s not the case for most of the country, and that’s made possible because of our proximity to Mexico,” Portillo Villeda said.
If even a fraction of the migrant workers are deported under Trump, there will be fewer tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers from Florida farms where undocumented laborers work. Same goes for upstate New York’s grapes; milk, cheese and butter in Wisconsin. Not to mention the $4.7 trillion lost from the U.S. GDP over the next decade — or the estimated 88,000 U.S. workers who would lose their jobs for every 1 million that are deported.
If migrant workers face intimidation in a second Trump administration, labor advocates fear abuses will go unreported, families will be separated and wage theft will rise. More lives are likely to be lost.