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 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, 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 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 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, 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: “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 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 “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 in an October radio interview.
Trump’s anti-immigration agenda “picks up right where he left off in 2020,” Miller said in an interview on The Charlie Kirk Show in November 2023, with mass deportations as the “daring and ambitious” centerpiece. When The New York Times asked 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 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 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 to a legal resident, and they are parents to at least 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 to 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 by 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 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 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 again in July.
These days, Homan is the face of a group called Border911, promoting it often on X, offering group mottoes like “The border is our theater of war” and promo 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.
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 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. Three former Trump administration officials served on the host committee. Attendees could pay for 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 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 on X in December 2023. By July, he was representing 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. 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 the plan’s architects. You could run a sober assessment of the numbers, of the current system’s capability, and come to the conclusion that such an operation is impossible. You could consider 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 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 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 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 ICE’s deception tactics to lure someone into arrest or gain access to their home without a warrant. ICE trains 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 that authorized Border Patrol agents to take children away from their parents, causing 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 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 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 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 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 to abolish ICE and immigrant detention. Yet, as of April 2024, at least 1,400 children are still separated 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.@melissagira ]
