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HOW MASS DEPORTATIONS WOULD ‘DEVASTATE’ TEXAS  
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Francesca D'Annunzio
October 21, 2024
Texas Observer
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_ The Lone Star State is home to millions of undocumented residents
and members of mixed-status families critical to the state’s
economic success, yet Texas leaders are cheering on Trump anyway. _

Donald Trump, Laconia Rally,Laconia NH July 16, 2015, Michael Vadon,
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

 

_ “This article was originally published by the Texas Observer
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Former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has
promised [[link removed]], if elected, to
implement the “largest deportation in the history of our country.”
If such an operation were carried out, a second Trump regime could
target around 11 million undocumented people
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in the United States. Trump’s running mate, vice presidential
candidate JD Vance, has suggested
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starting with 1 million deportations a year
[[link removed]]—a
figure that dwarfs the total [[link removed]] reached in any year of
Trump’s presidency or that of Barack Obama. The proposal has become
a rallying cry for Trump’s base, with supporters brandishing
matching signs at rallies reading “Mass Deportations Now.” 

Texas is home to some 1.6 million
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undocumented immigrants—second in the United States only to
California—and another roughly 1.4 million
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U.S. citizens in the state live with at least one undocumented family
member, per studies in recent years. Unauthorized workers form the
backbone of crucial sectors; in the construction industry, up to 50
percent of laborers building the state are undocumented, according to
a 2013 survey
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by the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project. All this means
Texas would be uniquely disrupted by Trump’s plans, with the tearing
apart of mixed-status families placing a possibly massive burden on
the state’s meager social services systems, and the exiling of a
chunk of its workforce imperiling the economic development and
affordability known as the so-called Texas Miracle.

Yet Texas’ statewide Republican leaders are full-throated backers of
a Trump return to the White House, leaving dissenters within the
immigrant and business community and Democratic Party to advocate for
millions of Texas families, workers, and consumers.

Protesters outside the Texas Capitol in 2017 (Sam DeGrave)

Trump has said
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that his deportation scheme would follow the “Eisenhower
model”—an apparent reference to the 1950s immigration raid and
roundup deportation program “Operation
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Wetback
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named after a racist slur. The raids, which lasted around a year,
rounded up hundreds of thousands
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of Mexicans—including Mexican Americans—who were rounded up by
truck, train, boat, and plane and deported. Around two decades prior,
up to 2 million were deported, again including U.S. citizens, in a
yearslong effort known as “Mexican Repatriation.”
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In an email to the _Texas Observer_, Democratic Congressman Joaquin
Castro said Trump’s proposal was also a threat to Latino U.S.
citizens. “The last time the United States launched a mass
deportation effort … U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent were rounded
up and sent to Mexico—a place that many had never been before. The
mass deportations that Trump is proposing would be devastating for our
economy and dangerous for American Latinos.” 

Stan Marek, CEO and owner of the Houston-based construction enterprise
Marek Family of Companies and a cofounder of Texans for Sensible
Immigration Policy, told the _Observer _that mass deportations would
exacerbate an existing construction labor shortage. Plus, he added,
there is no easy, reliable way for employers to verify someone’s
immigration status—and there has not been any significant
immigration reform or citizenship pathway created for undocumented
people since Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986.

Marek, a lifelong moderate Republican, instead proposes a mass work
authorization plan to protect immigrant workers from the possibility
of employer exploitation, increase the labor force, and ensure workers
can pass background checks and pay federal income taxes.

“There hasn’t been any way for a worker, a blue-collar worker, to
come into this country and get a job legally since 1986,” Marek
said, referring to the Immigration Reform and Control Act. (Some
short-term temporary and seasonal work visas for blue-collar workers
do exist.) Now, Marek said, we have a situation where we have millions
of undocumented in this country, “and now we’re totally dependent
on it because we need them.” 

Beyond construction, heavily undocumented workforces labor in
agriculture, food processing, house cleaning, and other industries.
“Immigrants exist across our economic spectrum. They’re
everywhere. They’re us,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic
opportunity at the progressive think tank Every Texan. “When we talk
about eliminating them from our society, it’s like not just talking
about cutting off a finger. We’re talking about cutting off entire
legs from the thigh down.”

Nationwide, the shock would be on par with the Great Recession of
2008, according to economic projections
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from the American Immigration Council. And, despite claims of
politicians like Trump and Vance, “Mass deportations are not going
to lead to more Americans getting jobs,” said Aaron
Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“There’s no evidence for that whatsoever.”

In a recent X post
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announced more details of his envisioned machine for deportations and
targeting transnational crime: He wants to invoke the Alien Enemies
Act of 1798—the same law that formed the basis of the executive
order that put Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War
II. 

The likely scale would be much more massive than the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II, when approximately 112,000
people
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displaced, said Reichlin-Melnick. And some civil liberties may have to
head for the chopping block to achieve Trump’s goals.

Presently, Reichlin-Melnick explained, the United States does not have
a system designed to find undocumented individuals who are not already
on the government’s radar. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE)
does not know the identities and addresses of the majority of
undocumented people. In order to carry out a mass deportation
operation, agents would need to go out into communities around the
country to find people—who are not already on their radar—and
round them up. 

“You create a surveillance society in order to root out millions of
people, because there’s really no other way to do it,” he said.
“Creating an apparatus to hunt down and identify millions of
undocumented immigrants would require turning the United States into a
police state.”

ICE raids impact more than just immigrant families, according to
Caitlin Patler, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley
focused on the detentions and deportation pipeline. These operations
are “traumatizing for entire communities, whether somebody’s
directly impacted or not,” she said. “Your kid would go to school
and next to them there would be an empty desk.”

Raids also negatively impact the health of children whose families
have been targeted for detention or deportation. Patler said even
unborn children have been impacted, and her work has found the
following outcomes: children having trouble sleeping, trouble eating,
crying uncontrollably, and “clinging to their remaining parent,
refusing to leave the house because they’re so scared that the other
parent will disappear or be taken from them in the same way that the
first parent was,” she said. “You can see a very clear pattern of
worsening health among people exposed to the deportation and detention
systems.”

The fear of a raid, detention, or deportation also pushes immigrant
and mixed-status families to avoid interacting with law enforcement.
University of Colorado Denver professor Chloe East said that creates
problems for police, who rely on community members for tips and
interviews when solving crimes.

Economically, however, there is one sector that would likely flourish
under a mass deportation regime: the prison industry. Texas is already
home to some of the nation’s largest immigration detention centers,
many of which are operated by private, for-profit companies. 

If deportations increase, the feds would likely build or lease even
more space for the detainees. Because Trump has proposed mobilizing
troops for immigration enforcement, mass military camps also aren’t
out of the question, said Bob Libal, an Austin-based consultant at
Human Rights Watch who has worked on immigrant detention issues for
years.

“I thought the idea of favorably talking about Japanese internment
was over in this country,” Libal said. “And yet—here we have
people talking about the utilization of mass deportations in a
positive light. And frankly, that should terrify everyone living in
Texas, whether you’re an immigrant or not.”

_FRANCESCA D'ANNUNZIO
[[link removed]] is a Roy
W. Howard investigative reporting fellow at the TEXAS OBSERVER.
D’Annunzio has reported on topics ranging from deportations in the
Dominican Republic, Christian nationalism, US-Mexico border colonias,
right-wing sheriffs, to zoning and housing policy in Texas. Her work
has been published or syndicated in The Guardian US, The Dallas
Morning News, Religion News Service, The Global Investigative
Journalism Network, The Texas Standard, and The Arizona Republic,
among others. She received her master’s in investigative journalism
from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
at Arizona State University and is an alumna of the Arabic Flagship
and Humanities programs at The University of Texas at Austin. She is
proficient in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic._

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