Dear Reader,

Rounding people up and deporting them may seem like a great idea if you’re playing in the culture wars. In a fact-free environment, devoid of hard economic statistics and humanity, you can claim that people who are in this country without legal immigration status are criminals who divert and consume American citizens’ resources without making any contribution. It’s almost as good of a political sound bite as the proverbial “tough on crime.”

That is, until someone you know gets picked up and marked for deportation.

In 2011, when Alabama passed HB 56, a cruel law designed to make conditions so harsh that undocumented people would “deport themselves,” I was the U.S. Attorney in Birmingham. When the measure passed, there was support for it in the community, especially from conservatives. Then the law went into effect, and I began to get phone calls from some of the bill’s supporters, begging for help.

The calls would go something like this: “Jose is such a good guy. He’s not one of the people we need to deport. He’s a great employee, super responsible, and a wonderful family man. He’s got American citizen kids who need their dad.” They would implore me, “You’ve got to do something to help him.”

What folks often fail to understand is that it’s too late at that point. Once you vote in someone like Donald Trump, it’s hard to stop that process once it’s in motion. You buy the ticket, you get the whole ride.

Trump’s Agenda 47 plan includes a provision titled “Agenda 47: Day One Executive Order Ending Citizenship for Children of Illegals and Outlawing Birth Tourism.” In it, he lays out his plan to put an immediate stop to granting birthright citizenship, which he says is based on an incorrect interpretation of the 14^th Amendment. Trump’s new border czar, Tom Homan, said Americans should expect “shock and awe” starting on day one of the new administration when it comes to the border and immigration. He claimed recently that Trump will use a “targeted” approach that prioritizes proceedings against national security threats, migrants with criminal history, and “fugitives” already subject to removal proceedings by court order.

But that’s what the Justice Department is already in the business of doing, and despite Trump’s political rhetoric, across both the Obama and Biden administrations, there were significant numbers of targeted prosecutions and deportation proceedings against undocumented people who were involved in criminal conduct or reentered the country illegally after being deported. For Trump to achieve the “mass deportations” he promises, he’s going to have to look to other parts of the undocumented population and find more resources in terms of personnel, housing, and immigration courts than we currently have to increase numbers as dramatically as he claims he will. He has already vowed to deploy the military inside of the United States to speed up the pace.

Trump may start with the low-hanging fruit—people already in custody or easily identified. But it won’t end there. No one is safe when the levers of government are controlled by people unwilling to use them responsibly.

Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer who argued many of the most high-profile cases during the first Trump administration, including the family separation case, spoke with me in September of 2021 for an episode of the CAFE Insider Podcast. Looking ahead to what might happen if Trump returns to office, Lee told me, “In the abstract, the public wants immigration reform, but I don’t think they will want the type of mass deportations being proposed when they see what it looks like in practice, with the military in the streets and little children separated from their parents.”

Despite all of the people who thought they were voting for “choose-your-own-adventure” Trump—lower gas and egg prices without the chaos—Trump has made it clear that he is serious about mass deportations. Tom Fitton, President of Conservative Judicial Watch, wrote on Truth Social at 4:03 a.m. Monday morning, “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.” Trump commented shortly afterward, “TRUE!!!”

What isn’t true are Trump’s claims about undocumented people, starting with his statement at the start of his 2016 campaign that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists across the border. In 2023, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” In April of this year, Trump said on the campaign trail, “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals.’” Most recently, he baselessly accused Haitian immigrants of eating people’s pets.

Here are the facts:

• • Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. More than one-third of that amount went to payroll taxes that fund programs and benefits they cannot access, programs like Social Security that they collectively paid $25.7 billion toward in 2022. It also includes $6.4 billion in payments to Medicare and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance payments in 2022.
  • Undocumented people do 25% of the agricultural work in this country—the most difficult, underpaid parts of it. They comprise 19% of workers who do building maintenance and groundskeeping. They contribute to construction (17% of workers) and food service (12%).
  • Nor are undocumented people the crime wave Donald Trump claims they are. The National Institute of Justice analyzed data and concluded that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

Despite these facts, undocumented people living in this country were fair game in the 2024 election, and now Donald Trump is promising to begin mass deportations as soon as he’s sworn into office. America is on the verge of reckoning with that reality.

Stay Informed,

Joyce