Trump has threatened mass deportations of the estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the U.S. without papers. In the campaign, he promised "the largest deportation operation in the history of our country." Stephen Miller, once again Trump’s deportation czar, is highly knowledgeable and even more ferocious than Trump on the subject.

What Trump actually does will depend on whether he wants to treat deportations as a spectacle, or whether he wants to quietly get millions of migrants to self-deport. If he wants the former, it’s easy to begin with the estimated 425,000 migrants who have committed crimes but are not behind bars. (Most of these, according to ICE, are for traffic violations.)

Trump may also be drawn to the theater of mass roundups, but that risks ugly footage of children being separated from parents and scenes of concentration camps. If Trump and Miller are serious about mass deportations, they would run into mass opposition, not just from appalled humanitarians but from corporate Republicans. The entire low-wage sector of the economy is heavily dependent on migrant labor.

According to the census, there are upwards of seven million foreign-born workers working in construction and other manual labor, trucking, janitorial work, as maids, in home care, nursing care, landscaping, taxi and Uber driving, and farm labor. As vulnerable people working for substandard wages, they subsidize the rest of us. Mass deportation would raise labor costs and increase inflation, spooking the Federal Reserve.

The construction industry lobby has gone into high gear to resist Trump’s deportation plans. In Texas, ground zero of deportation fervor, half a million immigrants work in construction. An estimated 60 percent of them are undocumented.

Mass deportations "would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools," Stan Marek, CEO of Marek, a Houston-based commercial and residential construction firm, told NPR. "Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labor."

In Dalton, Georgia, the self-styled "Carpet Capital of the World," which voted heavily for Trump, the local workforce is heavily reliant on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented. The Wall Street Journal quotes the local manager of a staffing agency: "If you took out the Hispanic workforce, this would shut down completely."

As it happens, there’s an easy way for Trump to promote large-scale self-deportations—if that’s what he really wants. It’s called the E-Verify program, which dates to 1996.

The E-Verify program maintains a government-wide database, using records from Social Security, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies, of people who are legally permitted to work in the U.S. When a worker applies for a job, they submit a form with documentation. If it matches the information in the database, they are cleared to work. Otherwise, they can’t legally be hired and there is a paper trail.

But E-Verify is optional for employers except on government contracts. One of the ideas in Project 2025 is to make it mandatory. If E-Verify matches were required of all job applicants, millions of migrants would no longer be able to work and would self-deport.

Trump, for all his bluster, may not want this outcome. It would infuriate employers, create chaos in numerous industries, and raise prices to consumers. And since mass deportation would separate families that often include some members who are documented and others who are not, it would also give serious pause to many Hispanic voters who have just recently gravitated to the Republicans on economic issues.

These and other divisive issues can be papered over in the context of a campaign. Not when you have to govern.