Trump’s mass deportation plan: What it means for undocumented and legal immigrants

Photo from Ethnic Media Services

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation program in US history.

This was estimated by Vice President-elect JD Vance to involve one million removals yearly.

Can the US afford these policies? What do these crackdowns mean for undocumented and legal immigrants?

Mass deportation

Based on census data surveys, there are an estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the US. as of July 2023 — about 3.5 percent of the total population, and up 800,000 from the previous July.

The all-time peak is 12 million immigrants, reached in 2008.

The highest year of deportations from the US interior is 238,000 immigrants, reached in 2009.

“Currently, most people we deport are already in detention. The government just picks them up … and figures out whether they’re allowed to be here and how to get them back, and if the country will take them back,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council, at a Friday, November 15 Ethnic Media Services briefing on Trump’s promised immigration policies.

Greg Chen, senior director of Government Relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), explains the ways in which Trump may attempt to ban certain categories of immigrants, using illegal criteria such as race or religion.

“With mass deportations, however, we’re talking about finding people in their communities,” he continued. “The two branches of the Department of Homeland Security that specifically do that do not have the capacity. It’s extremely expensive … Nor do we have the detention capacity. You’d need a whole new set of asylum facilities and judges before even getting people home.”

Deporting all undocumented immigrants, which represent about 4.8 percent of the US workforce as of 2022, would cost about $315 billion and have between a 4.2 percent and 6.8 percent negative impact on GDP, by conservative estimates.

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By comparison, the national GDP fell 4.3 percent during the Great Recession, from 2007 to 2009.

“For most things Congress will fund, they’ll need 60 votes. Budget reconciliation needs 50. It’s far from clear they can fund these measures … but they can repurpose money from elsewhere,” said Robbins. “It’s possible to use forms like the military, but our resources are already strained.”

The existing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget — $107.9 billion for fiscal year 2025 — exceeds all other federal law enforcement budgets combined.

The current daily detention capacity is estimated around 50,000.

Congress has provided approximately $3.4 billion to detain a daily average of 41,500 noncitizens in 2024, of which 60.1 percent have no criminal record.

For comparison, funds in 2023 were $2.9 billion to detain an average of 34,000 noncitizens daily.

Along with difficulties getting bipartisan Congressional support, “Biden has already maximally deployed existing resources for enforcement,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “They don’t have the resources to do much more … and contracting with private facilities, or training state and national guards, will mean more expensive delays.”

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DHS data from 2023 shows that, in absolute terms, 3.5 times as many people were removed under Biden than under Trump.

Of the 1.4 million arrests made in the 24 months of 2019 and 2020 under Trump, 47 percent were removed from the US.

In the first 26.3 months under Biden, DHS made over 5 million arrests, of which 51 percent were removed.

Legal immigration

“Trump has been talking so much about mass deportations that we rarely hear about impacts on the legal immigration system, meaning the hundreds of thousands of employment visas, family visas and humanitarian visas coming through every year,” said Chen.

Annual new legal permanent residents fell under Trump from 1,183,500 in 2016 to 707,400 in 2020, according to DHS data; the numbers have shot back up since then to 1,173,000 in 2023.

“During the first Trump administration, we saw retrogression — meaning it took much longer to process these cases,” Chen continued. “For an employment or family visa that might typically take three to six months, we saw those times typically double.”

He added that these backlogs are often created by understaffing departments and by Requests for Evidence, which are “ways of asking for more information on a case to ferret out fraud. But if used unnecessarily, it simply becomes red tape … and if immigration is unavailable to people who are trying to come here through legal means, we’ll be seeing greater amounts of illegal migration.”

Currently, immigrants arriving at official crossing points on the border can make an appointment through the CBP One app and wait months to be processed into the US with temporary humanitarian parole.

“People who try to enter between those points have a very hard time qualifying to begin the process towards asylum,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration policy program. “Under Trump, we can expect that the CPB One process at ports of entry will end, meaning that it will be very difficult for people coming to the border to access legal asylum proceedings,” she continued.

“Instead, we’ll likely see what we’ve seen before: people paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States, rather than to the border, where many people now present themselves to border authorities to ask for protection,” she added.

Trump has also suggested that he’ll scale back the use of Temporary Status — which covers over one million immigrants, mostly Venezuelan, Haitian and Salvadoran — and eliminate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), on which about 580,000 immigrants rely.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the president can terminate DACA, a policy which gives some people who came to the U.S. illegally as children the right to study and work in the country.

“Most employers want to hire a legal workforce. If their workers lose authorizations like DACA and TPS, they’ll have to let them go,” said Gelatt. “We’re an aging country … and when we lose immigrant workers, it doesn’t necessarily create jobs for U.S. workers. If an employer loses the immigrant workers they rely on, they might contract out their operation or close up shop altogether. Immigrants and US workers are compliments in the labor force.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the unemployment rate for US-born workers in 2023 was 3.6 percent, the lowest on record.

That year, the share of employed prime-age (25 to 54) U.S.-born workers was 81.4 percent, the highest rate since 2001.

While mass crackdowns on these immigrants “will take more resources than the new administration will have, resulting in economic devastation across the country, they’re still counting on instilling fear in communities,” added Chen. “We have people with legal status calling our attorneys because they’re afraid that they’ll be rounded up because they’ll be profiled. Those are legitimate concerns in this new environment.”

“What does it look like when that intimidation campaign is working? It looks like kids not going to school because their parents fear being deported, shortages of health care workers because people move to safer states or are removed from the country, like shortages of teachers here on TPS and DACA,” said Elizabeth Taufa, policy attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

“Even if they can’t afford to enforce these policies, they’re unraveling the threads of our American communities,” she added. (Ethnic Media Services)