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THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE SCALE OF TRUMP’S DEPORTATION PLANS  
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Melissa Gira Grant
October 17, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass operation that could
involve a force larger than the U.S. Army — and he promises that it
will be a “bloody story.” _

Illustration by Brian Stauffer / The New Republic,

 

Jennifer crossed into the United States last year, having reached the
southern border on June 16, 2023, the eighth anniversary of Donald
Trump’s entrance
[[link removed]] down
a fading gold escalator and into the 2016 presidential election.
(“Jennifer” is the name she is using, given the situation.) She
had left Venezuela with her two young sons, a difficult and traumatic
journey over thousands of miles on foot, she said, ending in New York
City, where they settled as a family in a shelter for newly arrived
migrants. “I come here as a political asylum,” she told me,
through a Spanish interpreter, when we spoke late in August. “I come
here because I fear for my life and my children’s life back home.”
But a little more than two months later, she would be separated from
her sons, after she was detained by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, or ICE. This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone
seeking asylum, but it does. This wasn’t supposed to happen in
a sanctuary city
[[link removed]],
but that did not matter to ICE. “I just needed help in regards to my
children,” said Jennifer, “and I didn’t know this will just get
me jailed.”

While Jennifer was in a detention center in New Jersey, unsure why she
was being held, unable to speak to her children, Trump, in
an interview [[link removed]] with
Tucker Carlson on X, was promising a massive deportation operation. As
president, “number one is border,” he said, leaning forward, as if
to underline the word, as if “border” was a complete thought.
“And—taking hundreds of thousands of criminals that have been
allowed into our country and getting them out and bringing them back
to their country.” The next day, Trump would be arrested at the
Fulton County Jail in Georgia, a planned surrender after which he
would only briefly
[[link removed]] be
held in custody, on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020
election. Jennifer would be hospitalized after a panic attack, she
said, not knowing what would happen to her sons. “The thought of
being separated from them nearly broke me.”

When Jennifer asked ICE officers when she would be released, she
recalled, they laughed at her and told her she was going to be
deported because she had a criminal case against her. But that
wasn’t true: ICE had detained her after information about her was
released to the agency, in violation of Jennifer’s rights. (ICE did
not provide a response to a list of detailed questions about
Jennifer’s case.) She had asked the shelter for help getting family
therapy, to support her kids after their journey, and someone at the
shelter had called New York’s child protection agency, the
Administration for Children’s Services. Jennifer didn’t know that
ACS was now investigating her. She didn’t know, contrary to the
agency’s own policy and the city’s laws, that it would share this
information with ICE.

A spokesperson for ACS confirmed that the agency had investigated “a
complaint about an employee sharing data in a particular case, upon
request from ICE,” and that “ACS took immediate corrective action,
including reinforcing ACS policy prohibiting data sharing with ICE.”
She added, “ACS takes our legal and moral responsibility to protect
immigrant children, youth, and families from possible federal
immigration consequences very seriously.”

It wouldn’t have been possible to watch Trump’s interview from
within ICE detention in New Jersey, when Jennifer was incarcerated
there. By the time I was introduced to her and got to ask her about
Trump’s mass deportation promises, a year had passed, and she was
released, but not yet living with her sons. “Hearing him say these
things makes me feel afraid to be deported, of course, because of
everything that happened with ICE,” she said. “I’m literally
innocent. The thing is, if they say I have a criminal record, this
could get me deported, and of course I’m afraid of that.”

Speaking with Jennifer not long after the Republican National
Convention, with Trump’s latest “largest deportation
operation” promises
[[link removed]],
here in New York in the late summer of 2024, Trump’s plans do not
seem so remote. The pieces seem already to be in place. It may look
like ICE officers coming at dawn, separating families in their living
rooms, on their stoops. It may also look like someone behind the
scenes, just doing her city job, speaking with ICE about a young
mother.

 

Trump’s highest-profile mass deportations promise, made at the
Republican National Convention, did not involve a detailed plan, but
it did follow the familiar beats of a Trump speech. First, the
lie—“they’re sending their murderers to the United States of
America.” Then, the riff on the lie—“This is going to be very
bad. And bad things are going to happen. And you’re seeing all the
time.” Last, the tough talk about how he’ll fix it. Mostly what
made the news was the last part of his speech, which Trump’s
spokesperson repeated
[[link removed]]:
“On Day One back in the White House, President Trump will begin the
largest criminal deportation operation of illegal immigrants and
restore the rule of law.” Trump’s rhetoric—“getting them out
will be a bloody story,” he said at a September rally—is
escalating.

This project has already been touted by Trump’s vice presidential
candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and by Russell Vought, a key author
of Project 2025. Vance defended mass deportations against what he
called “the lying media” in a Fox interview in July. (It’s a
phrase that may be more familiar in the original German.) According to
Vance, “You just start with the worst people” before worrying
about the rule of law—“before you get into what you can’t do.”
The rule of law need not be a concern. Vought has been more direct in
saying that deportations are a racial purity project. In what
he thought
[[link removed]] was
a private meeting in July, Vought mused, “We could save the country
in a sense of, you know, the largest deportation in history….
That’s going to cause us, to get us off multiculturalism, just to be
able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”

Then there are the guys Trump has already positioned to carry this
project out: Stephen Miller, Trump’s former White House adviser, and
Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director. Both served in pivotal
roles crafting the destructive
[[link removed]] “zero
tolerance” policy of 2018, separating families newly arrived in the
United States. Miller has detailed Trump’s plans in numerous
interviews with conservative media, sounding credible enough about its
details, such as constructing camps along the border. Homan,
meanwhile, is rehearsing for his Trump administration roles, as both
the expert face of mass deportations and their merciless enforcer.
“You’ve seen Tom Homan. He’s coming on board,” Trump promised
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an October radio interview.

Trump’s anti-immigration agenda “picks up right where he left off
in 2020,” Miller said in an interview
[[link removed]] on _The
Charlie Kirk Show_ in November 2023, with mass deportations as the
“daring and ambitious” centerpiece. When _The New York
Times_ asked
[[link removed]] Trump
about these plans, the campaign directed the paper to Miller. Those
plans he shared included ending the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program, or DACA; again invoking Title 42, health emergency
restrictions that expired last year, and that, by framing immigration
as a public health threat, limited the number of people entering the
United States; and building “vast holding facilities,” otherwise
known as camps, to house detained immigrants ahead of deportation. He
emphasized that a Trump administration could pull this off working
within existing laws.

Miller also chatted with Kirk about how a Trump administration would
fill these camps. “You go to the red state governors and you say,
‘Give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration
enforcement officers,’” Miller said. He would have “experienced
ICE veterans” leading the operations, with “DEA, ATF, et
cetera.” and “state and local sheriffs.” They would “go around
the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”
Trump has backed up
[[link removed]] the
personnel plan, bluntly telling _Time _magazine, “We will be using
local law enforcement.”

Stephen Miller also chatted with Kirk about how a Trump administration
would fill these camps. “You go to the red state governors and you
say, ‘Give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as
immigration enforcement officers,” Miller said. They would “go
around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale
raids.”

Immigration enforcement is federal, not local. There are provisions
for authorizing state and local law enforcement agencies for certain
limited immigration enforcement, known as the 287(g) program. The
American Civil Liberties Union has called
[[link removed]] the
program a “License to Abuse” and found that, during his
presidency, Trump expanded its use five times over, more than doubling
the deportations under the program. Sheriffs especially have pushed
beyond the purported limits of the program, laying the groundwork for
further abuse, which is what Trump is proposing: turning any law
enforcement agency into an immigration enforcement agency. That, in
fact, is what his plan would require. Once immigrants or people who
have been profiled as immigrants have been detained through various
law enforcement agencies, Miller imagines they will be moved to
camps—“throughput facilities”—where they will be detained just
long enough to deport them. This would go far beyond apprehensions at
the border, since many immigrants have lived without authorization in
the United States for years. It will separate families: At least 1.1
million are married [[link removed]] to a
legal resident, and they are parents to at least
[[link removed]] 4.9
million children. Lives built here over generations could be shattered
with one agent’s haphazard decisions, with one vindictive
neighbor’s call.

At no point in this plan does anything resembling due process figure
in. Miller was confident that the legal side would not be all that
challenging. Trump’s anti-immigration programs as president, Miller
said, were “far more legally complicated and challenging and novel
by comparison than the mass deportation operation,” which Miller
regards as “primarily a massive logistical challenge.”

Trump has said the plan is to deport 15 million to 20 million people.
As of 2022 , there were 11 million immigrants living in the United
States without authorization, according
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Pew Research Center; 11 million people is around 3.3 percent of the
total population of the United States as of this writing.

Trump proposes to deport nearly twice that many people. That means
that not only immigrants living in the country without authorization
would be targeted. In fact, Trump has expressly called for some
Haitian immigrants with protected status to be deported as well. Given
the extreme methods proposed, raids would almost certainly involve
detaining family members, co-workers, and community members simply for
being there when officers descended.

The Trump administration deported 1.5 million people throughout his
entire four-year term, and President Joe Biden’s administration had
deported 1.1 million as of February 2024. But those figures do not
include the three million people who were immediately expelled after
crossing the border when Title 42 was in effect, between March 2020
and May 2023—the overwhelming majority of those Title 42 expulsions
having taken place under Biden. According to an analysis
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the Migration Policy Institute, “the Biden administration’s nearly
4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single
presidential term since the George W. Bush administration.”

 

The man Trump has selected to oversee his planned mass deportation of
15 million to 20 million people frequently ties his credibility to the
four years he worked Border Patrol. “I know what it’s like to
arrest an alien and feel bad about it. I know what it’s like to see
a dead alien on the trail,” Tom Homan said
[[link removed]] in
a 2018 profile. Nearly his entire career has been immigration
enforcement, most recently as Trump’s acting director of ICE. At
that time, he accused
[[link removed]] the
Oakland mayor, who opposed his impending sweeps, of acting as a
“gang lookout,” and called for elected officials’ prosecution if
they followed suit. He has attacked sanctuary cities, in part because
he claims they interfere with what he regards to be the safest way for
his officers to round up immigrants for deportation: by picking them
up from local police. “Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for
criminals,” he claimed
[[link removed]] again
in July.

These days, Homan is the face of a group called Border911, promoting
it often on X, offering
[[link removed]] group mottoes
like “The border is our theater of war” and promo
[[link removed]] videos packed
with shots of Homan and other men in tactical gear with the U.S. flag.
This is the theater, and Trump openly praises Homan’s performance.
“He has been so great on television,” Trump said at a campaign
stop in April, with a Stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath sign on
the lectern
[[link removed]].

Border911, with Homan leading the group, has essentially been
campaigning for Trump, promising crackdowns on immigration—and
seriously skirting tax law in doing so, in the eyes of some experts.
In April, Border911 held a fundraising gala
[[link removed]] at
Mar-a-Lago to support the group’s nationwide tour to battleground
states, “educating the American people” to “vote for border
security” in November, Homan said
[[link removed]].
Three former Trump administration officials served on the host
committee. Attendees could pay
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a photo with Trump. “We’re working on the border together,”
Trump said at the gala. “Tom made a pledge: If you win, I’m coming
back.” ABC News asked the group’s representatives about its
apparent endorsement of Trump, for example, with the T-shirt Border911
sold and Homan promoted, reading, “Trump Comes Back. I Come Back. We
Fix This Shit!”—Tom Homan. The group then removed the shirt and
other pro-Trump materials from its website. Border911 could have
been violating
[[link removed]] tax
law, because 501(c)(3) charitable organizations are barred from
supporting specific candidates. The group’s attorney said it was in
the process of registering a 501(c)(4) that would allow Border911 to
support a candidate, and that “Tom is very committed to cleaning it
up…. As a former law enforcement officer, he wants to follow the
[law].”

 

“I’m going to run the biggest deportation operation this
country’s ever seen,” Tom Homan declared
[[link removed]] on X in
December 2023. By July, he was representing
[[link removed]] Trump’s
plans at the Heritage Foundation’s “policy fest” at the
Republican National Convention. Homan, a Heritage fellow, almost
bellowed as he assured the applauding conventiongoers, “No one’s
off the table. The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal.
They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to
enter this country illegally.”

“I’m going to run the largest deportation operation this
country’s ever seen,” Tom Homan declared on X in December 2023. By
July, he was representing Trump’s plans at the Heritage
Foundation’s “policy fest” at the RNC. Homan, a Heritage fellow,
assured the applauding conventiongoers, “No one’s off the
table.”

The idea that the United States should arrest, detain, and deport
every single person who crosses the border unlawfully is not built
into the immigration system. The crime of “unlawful entry” was
created only in 1929. The system of immigration detention we have
today came much later, in tandem with the rise of mass incarceration
in the 1980s and 1990s, writes Silky Shah, executive director of
Detention Watch Network, in her 2024 book _Unbuild Walls
[[link removed]]_.
Routinely detaining and deporting people who crossed the border
without authorization was uncommon until the 1980s. Before then, if
immigration enforcement detained people at all, it was for a few days,
after which they were released on parole as immigration proceedings
unfolded.

This is also when the narrative of “criminal aliens” took root,
Shah argues. It was beginning to show up in aspects of anti-drug
legislation—like “detainer” policies, which authorized the
Immigration and Naturalization Service and local law enforcement to
coordinate so as to more quickly move immigrants arrested on drug
charges into INS custody and deportation proceedings. After the 9/11
attacks, policy and narrative about “criminal aliens” were bound
even more tightly together through the “war on terrorism.” By the
time Congress scrapped INS in 2002, and ICE was born, federal
legislation defined a greater number of immigrants as “criminal
aliens” by expanding the list of crimes for which immigrants could
be detained or deported, and, through the kick-started 287(g) program,
local police could help ICE track them down, streamlining the
arrest-to-deportation pipeline. “The arguments used to expand
immigrant detention cemented xenophobic beliefs that migrants are
undeserving of rights,” Shah writes, “and over time the law
changed to support the belief.”

Homan, Trump, Miller, and many others are not really innovating with
the substance of this rhetoric—_immigrants are
criminals._ “It’s a very intentional narrative, but it goes
beyond a narrative,” said Marlene Galaz, director of immigrant
rights policy at New York Immigration Coalition, or NYIC. “Painting
immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals has been a strategy for a
while now. But I do think that that narrative leads into actual
policy.” Trump et al. are popularizing the narrative, taking it to a
new extreme: a more straightforward, scapegoating narrative about what
to do with immigrants, one with a catchy solution that can be captured
in a campaign sign.

It is not easy to assess whether Trump actually can deport the many
millions of people he has promised to remove from the United States.
You could ask
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plan’s architects. You could run a sober assessment
[[link removed]] of
the numbers, of the current system’s capability, and come to the
conclusion that such an operation is impossible. You could consider
[[link removed]] all
of the ways mass deportation might shred both the law and legal norms,
something well on its way. But, as Andrea Pitzer, who has written a
history of concentration camps, said in a recent essay
[[link removed]] in _Scientific
American_, “The argument that a second Trump administration
wouldn’t be able to launch such an operation because of a lack of
personnel or legal authority should be understood as largely
irrelevant because it presupposes the intention of running a precise,
legal project at all.”

Journalist Radley Balko offered a highly detailed analysis of the
logistical complexities of such a scheme, estimating such a force
would exceed the number of active-duty U.S. Army troops, detaining a
population at least twice that of New York City, deporting them on
thousands of flights.

We should take as a given that mass deportations in the United States
would involve its enforcers violating the law while being shielded by
the law. It may seem like a paradox, but it is the only way I can make
sense of the conditions we are in. Radley Balko, author of _Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police
Forces,_ offered in his newsletter a highly detailed analysis
[[link removed]] of the
logistical complexities of such a scheme and of the potential steps
beyond the law that could be taken to deputize any law enforcement
officer as an immigration officer, and the broad exemptions from civil
liability such officers would enjoy. Balko estimated such a force
would exceed the number of active-duty U.S. Army troops, detaining a
population at least twice that of New York City, deporting them on
thousands of flights. Jessica Pishko, author of _The Highest Law in
the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy_,
said in a recent essay that sheriffs would be key players
[[link removed]] here,
not only as enforcers for ICE, which some have been for years under
287(g), but in the manner that sheriffs like Arizona’s Joe Arpaio
have paved the way for mass deportations.

Making sense of Trump’s plans is something many immigrants and
immigrants’ rights attorneys and organizers have had to grapple with
for nearly a decade now. “The Trump administration shined this kind
of spotlight on the cruelty of our immigration system, and the way it
severs people from their families and communities,” said Marie Mark
of Immigrant Defense Project. “But that was all legal. That is all
already part of our law and continues to be the law—was the law
before Trump, and was the law after Trump.” If the goal is to arrest
as many immigrants as possible, Mark said, a Trump administration will
do what already works.

IDP has documented
[[link removed]] ICE’s
deception tactics to lure someone into arrest or gain access to their
home without a warrant. ICE trains
[[link removed]] agents on such
techniques—it calls them “ruses,” part of ICE policy—which
escalated under Trump. They knock and pretend to be local police. They
call and pretend they found lost IDs. They pretend a target’s child
is a victim of a crime. Mark emphasized, “They’ll do what works,
and what we’ve seen is that lying to people at their door does
work.” They may use the same lies on people’s employers, their
friends, their family, to find them. “People’s desire to comply
with people in authority is what’s being used against them.”

There are these “moments of crisis,” Abraham Paulos, deputy
director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, or BAJI, told me,
“that folks feel like things actually change on the books,” but
it’s not necessarily true—it may just be a shift in priorities, or
it may be that someone is just noticing something that’s long been
common to immigration enforcement. “The kind of mass deportation
that is being called for by the people attending the Republican
National Convention is already here,” said Mark, “and is already
being experienced by communities that include immigrants.” We’ve
seen before when Trump approaches mass deportations, “there’s an
element of intentional chaos to the terror,” she said. “I think
there is a certain amount of disbelief about how much worse it could
get.”

 

Trump’s deportation machine is an inheritance, built by the
administrations before him. The laws may not be new, a fact that makes
the attitudes of the people Trump is bringing with him so significant.
“The Thomas Homans, that kind of ethos,” said Paulos, “the
feeling like the laws are restricting them in ways that they can’t
do their jobs—right?—is a very dangerous, and, I think, very
different mentality than what we have under the Democrats.” This is
not to say that Democrats aren’t also taking a very tough stance
right now. But Trump needs the kind of people carrying out mass
deportations who are real preserve-law-and-order guys, who will also
say that’s why they should be able to violate people’s rights
under the law.

Given the further mainstreaming of the far right and the persistence
of far-right violence even after Trump left office, Trump’s
potential return clears a path for such people to get their hands on
the deportation machine. Where there are police, the last several
years have also shown, there are “patriots,” those who would
rather cloak their vigilantism in law-and-order officialdom.
Sometimes, the patriots are the police, waiting for a sign. In 2017,
Trump was that sign, “letting us do our job and taking the handcuffs
off the men and women of the Border Patrol and ICE,” as Tom
Homan said
[[link removed]] on
Fox at the time.

Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, a senior director of advocacy with the
NYIC, organizing around Buffalo, New York, remembered encountering
this sort of permission-giving during Trump’s first term. “He
doesn’t necessarily have to make those things explicit, because of
the hate and the message that he has been sending,” she told me.
“The people who work within those forces now feel like they don’t
have to restrain themselves, and take it upon themselves to take that
initiative. It’s not necessarily that he’s going to every
sheriff’s department and saying, _Hey, will you help us
out?”_ Campaigning is a way for Trump to draw on and embolden the
racism and hate for immigrants that already exists, she explained:
“And then, when he is in power, that message is sent to those folks
that they have the power and the backing of the White House to use
their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants in
their communities.”

Those people haven’t moved on entirely just because Trump has been
out of power. They are watching and waiting. “There’s a lot of
patriots out there that want to come back,” Tom Homan told
[[link removed]] Breitbart
News in a 2022 interview, saying he’d had phone calls from dozens of
former ICE and Border Patrol agents, “also retired, and they watch
TV. They get fed up. They’re just as upset as I am.” Homan claimed
that, in a second Trump administration, there would be “no problem
finding leaders within [the Department of Homeland Security] to secure
this border and shut it down once and for all.”

And if Trump loses? They still may be waiting. Homan’s Border911
group itself is something these guys could rally around, still feeling
that they were serving Trump.

In January, one of the boldface names of Border911 was sighted near
the border wall in Arizona, as reported
[[link removed]] firsthand
by immigration journalist Melissa del Bosque. Jaeson Jones, a former
Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned far-right media
personality, accompanied a small group of masked, armed men, who
were conducting
[[link removed]] their
own “patrol,” dressed in tactical gear, appearing similar to
immigration officials—“a MAGA media militia,” as del Bosque
referred to them—frightening migrants, and “implying that they
were a federal agency,” said one volunteer with an NGO aiding
migrants who had arrived at this organization’s makeshift camp.
Jones went on Newsmax later and accused
[[link removed]] the NGO volunteers of
“smuggling” people into the country. He said what they were doing
was “absolutely illegal.” That’s not true.

The far-right, conspiratorial element of Border911 goes back to its
origins as part of the America Project, a group founded
[[link removed]] by
Michael Flynn, former Army general, former Trump national security
adviser, and election conspiracy theorist, and Patrick Byrne, founder
of Overstock.com and a major funder
[[link removed]] behind
many efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and install Trump.
Homan, who has served as the America Project’s CEO since March 2023,
is also the director of the Justice for All Project, most notable for
its connection
[[link removed]] to
the song “Justice for All,” a performance of “The Star-Spangled
Banner” by January 6 defendants, recorded from jail and mixed with
Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Byrne told the Associated
Press that the America Project had helped create the song, which Trump
has prominently featured at rallies as a tribute to those who laid
siege to the Capitol on his behalf.

Homan and Trump harbor a “cruelty-and-chaos agenda,” as Zachary
Mueller of the immigrants’ rights group America’s Voice referred
[[link removed]] to
it, speaking with del Bosque after her brush with Border911. They
wield the threat of mass deportations to terrorize immigrants, using
“nativist and xenophobic rhetoric,” he said, which in turn could
empower a range of vigilante projects. “They are using immigrants as
the vehicle,” said Mueller, “to socialize why we should not have a
democracy.”

 

This mass deportation machine we already have requires continuous
maintenance—justifying it, creating demand. Today it’s the
dangerous rhetoric referring
[[link removed]] to
an “invasion” by immigrants, allegedly threatening national
sovereignty, and calls for the U.S. military to “defend” the
border. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s busing
[[link removed]] of
newly arrived immigrants—to New York, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to
Washington, D.C.—supported the fearmongering notion that “every
state is a border state.”

And while Republicans are leading such vilification of immigrants,
some Democrats are joining in. After the recent arrivals of immigrants
in New York City, the idea that they were a drain on the city became a
reason for detaining and deporting them. Mayor (and former police
officer) Eric Adams has said
[[link removed]] that
these immigrants “will destroy” New York City. “The police
budget is continuously increasing every year, and our educational
budget is not, and they’re actually blaming migrants for it,” said
Abraham Paulos at BAJI. “There’s no room in the shelters.
There’s no room for housing … but are they ever out of beds in
Rikers?” he added, referring to the large New York City jail.

“The reality in New York state is that local law enforcement has
colluded with immigration for decades, and that has been weaponized in
different ways under different administrations,” said Maloney de
Zaldivar from NYIC. “We expect them to continue to be weaponized
under a new Trump administration, and frankly they’re weaponized
under the current administration as well.” Defeating Trump does not
bring this weaponization of police as immigration enforcement officers
to an end. “There is infrastructure definitely to implement a
deportation agenda,” said Marlene Galaz at NYIC. But, as several
advocates told me, New York’s state legislature could pass
[[link removed]] the
New York for All Act, meant to block state and government agencies,
police, and sheriffs from sharing information with ICE, across New
York; other states could take similar measures. Given Miller and
Homan’s plans to deputize local police, one way to make that more
difficult would be to put a check on the power of those police.

As advocates are working to prevent Trump from further exploiting the
deportation systems that already exist, people are stuck in that
system right now. All the advocates and organizers I spoke to
emphasized the work they are doing now—defending and accompanying
people through immigration proceedings, locating enough lawyers
skilled at working in the immigration system who aren’t themselves
overburdened, uncovering and challenging abuse of immigrants in
detention. This ever-accumulating workload would continue into a Trump
administration. As Marie Mark at IDP said, “We are already
struggling with the scale of deportation that exists.”

 

One year has passed since Jennifer was released from immigrant
detention. Envision Freedom Fund, a community-run bail fund, paid for
her bond. We were put in touch after she had given testimony
[[link removed]] about ICE, ACS,
and the shelter, outside city hall. She was living in the Bronx,
working at a hair salon. Her teenage sons have started school in New
York.

“A lot of families, a lot of mothers that come here, we come truly
because we want a better life,” she told me. “And we just don’t
know what will happen.” What she had not known, she said, would be
“what I went through—and that I’m still going through, because
I’m still not living with my children”—and how could she have
known? She was separated from her family, after all they had been
through, when keeping them safe is why she came here.

 

Though no longer border czar, Tom Homan frequently
[[link removed]] appeared
on Fox and other venues, backing up his former boss. Sometimes he even
called back to his work at ICE under President Barack Obama. In 2023,
on a Heritage Foundation podcast
[[link removed]],
an interviewer asked Homan about Trump and “these so-called kids in
cages.” Homan replied, “The cages were built under the Obama
administration, I was there.” He’s not wrong; but he spun on:
“They’re not cages, they’re chain-link dividers,” he claimed,
adding they were meant “for the protection of the children.”

Homan has been identified
[[link removed]] as
the “father” of the Trump administration’s family separation
policy, after a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation by Caitlin
Dickerson in _The Atlantic_, reporting that involved numerous records
of the program’s development. In 2014, Homan pitched the idea to Jeh
Johnson, then head of DHS under President Obama, who considered it
“heartless and impractical” and rejected it. Trump ultimately ran
with the policy, and Homan is listed as one of three authors on the
2018 memo
[[link removed]] that
authorized Border Patrol agents to take children away from their
parents, causing
[[link removed]] pain
and chaos in federal courts, jails, and shelters. Trump’s team
justified themselves with the rhetoric Homan used in the beginning,
and still uses: that family separation was nothing new, and that
family separation wasn’t meant to hurt families and children, but to
protect them.

Family separations are likely to return in force; as Dickerson
reported, the policy’s architects “argued that Zero Tolerance had
been effective—or that it would have been, if only it had been left
in place a little longer.” They offer a chilling, clear forecast for
mass deportations: a policy driven by nativist ideologues in Trump’s
inner circle; pushed through despite serious legal and ethical
questions from at least some people in leadership; rolled out without
notice, including to some of those tasked with carrying it out; and
then, when the press and immigrants’ rights groups demanded answers,
a policy its backers denied even existed.

The denial was deep. It came from top DHS officials when questioned
[[link removed]] about
family separation by then-Senator Kamala Harris, days after the family
separation memo Homan had co-written was signed. In a House hearing in
2019, as he was questioned by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Homan appeared
[[link removed]] to
deny that separating immigrant families was exceptional. “When I was
a police officer in New York, and I arrested a father for domestic
violence, I separated that father from his family,” said Homan.

In May 2018, not long after the policy had been announced, when Border
Patrol separated
[[link removed]] a
father from his family near the border in Texas, where they were
requesting asylum, the child’s father was so distressed, he began
shaking and punching the chain-link detention cell. He was moved to a
local jail that night, and the next morning he was found lifeless in
his cell. This does not justify but perhaps explains why some
agents reportedly
[[link removed]] started
lying to parents about where they were taking children, with Border
Patrol officers saying that their children were going to go have a
bath.

Family separation angered people more than almost anything else Trump
did until January 6. It sparked calls
[[link removed]] to
abolish ICE and immigrant detention. Yet, as of April 2024, at least
1,400 children are still separated
[[link removed]] from
their families. By the time Trump could return to the White House in
January, some of those immigrant families—among countless
others—will still likely be apart. We can’t know how many more
might go missing if Trump returns to the White House. If he remains in
power, we may never know.

_[MELISSA GIRA GRANT is a staff writer at The New Republic and the
author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
[[link removed]].@melissagira
[[link removed]] ]_

* deportations
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* Immigrants
[[link removed]]
* 2024 Elections
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* border
[[link removed]]
* U.S. Army
[[link removed]]
* US Border Patrol
[[link removed]]
* Border Patrol
[[link removed]]
* ICE
[[link removed]]
* Haitians
[[link removed]]
* Springfield
[[link removed]]
* J.D. Vance
[[link removed]]
* Stephen Miller
[[link removed]]
* Tim Homan
[[link removed]]
* Heritage Foundation
[[link removed]]
* Project 2025
[[link removed]]
* Eric Adams
[[link removed]]
* Border911
[[link removed]]
* family separation
[[link removed]]

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