The Horror
This excellent piece by Radly Balko at his newsletter on Trump’s fascist immigration is sobering. Like him, I don’t think people are taking this seriously enough. It’s a nightmare in the making and a percolating international crisis when most of the rest of the world rises up in horror at the most powerful nation on earth enacting a massive policy of ethnic cleansing.
Some excerpts:
Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.
Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.
Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.
(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.)
In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.
That’s not all:
Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship.
Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.
The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.
The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”
It is a nightmare. Even aside from the utter moral depravity and betrayal of everything American ideals are supposed to stand for, there are more practical considerations as well:
Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.
Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.
Balko says that it is logistically impossible to round up and deport that many people although they could make a good stab at it. But just imagine:
The pre-World War II Jewish population of Europe — including the Soviet Union — was about 9 million. So just in terms of transporting people, we’re looking at an operation that would need to be two thirds larger than the Nazi transport of Jews during the Holocaust — if they’d managed to get to every Jewish person on the continent…
The Trump immigration plan would be the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II.
What would it cost? In 2017, ICE estimated that it cost an average of $10,854 to deport one person, or about $14,000 in today’s dollars. Under this calculation, Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people would cost about $210 billion, or about 14 percent more than the annual budget of the U.S. Army.
There’s much more and I urge you to read the whole thing. if they are able to even accomplish a fraction of what they plan, the United States will effectively be a fascist state when all is said and done. It’s incredibly chilling.