In a little less than three months, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president. His chief campaign promise to crack down on undocumented immigrants is top of mind as he prepares to return to office.
“There is no price tag,” Trump told NBC News on Thursday, speaking about his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
“It's not a question of a price tag. It's not — really, we have no choice,” he former and future president said. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they're going to go back to those countries because they're not staying here. There is no price tag,” he said.
The president-elect added that although “we obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country.”
I'm not somebody that says, 'No, you can't come in.' We want people to come in,” he said.
Trump made mass deportations and a hardline crackdown on undocumented immigration and asylum-seekers a central pillar of his campaign. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, the former president has expressed a desire to invoke the Alien Enemies Act — an 18th century wartime law that was used to justify the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII — to authorize the detainment and removal of undocumented migrants.
Longtime Trump adviser and immigration hawk Stephen Miller has stated publicly that the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act over existing immigration law would allow Trump's future administration to “suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”
The logistics of the plan will be expansive, and expensive. In November of last year, Miller told The New York Times that Trump is prepared to weaponize the Insurrection Act to use federal law enforcement, the National Guard, and local law enforcement as immigration jackboots in the national crackdown. Miller also touted the construction of massive detainment camps — concentration camps, if you will — in areas of rural Texas to hold migrants awaiting deportation. The money to fund their construction would come from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” Miller told the Times. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation's laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”
But some legal immigrants, who are also American workers, fear that the national crackdown on immigration may sweep them up in its wake.
In September, after broadcasting a racist smear accusing Haitian immigrants of slaughtering and eating local pets in Springfield, Ohio, Trump vowed to deport the immigrants living in the city. We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we're going to start with Springfield and Aurora [,Colorado].” Trump said.
The only problem being that most of the Haitian migrants in Springfield are documented, and hold valid work authorizations. It's no matter to the president-elect, who has also vowed to end refugee resettlement programs, severely restrict access to asylum claims, and suggested putting an end to birthright citizenship.
Trump is preparing to enact the most vengeful fantasies held by himself and his supporters against immigrants — human or financial cost be damned.
