It’s a humanitarian disaster in the making—right there in plain sight.
Trump talks about it all the time. It’s in the RNC platform. His supporters wave signs about it. His minions and Project 2025 provide the details.
“Mass deportation.”
Like “The Wall” in 2016, there is no more consistent theme about what Trump plans to do than that promise.
The only thing that changes is just how many people Trump plans to deport. He told Time Magazine the number was between 15 and 20 million. He also is explicit that he would assign the National Guard and/or the military to accomplish the deportation.
It’s bandied about like just another talking point.
But what’s lost on too many people is what an absolute disaster a deportation program of that scale would be. It would quickly turn into one of the most dire humanitarian crises this nation has ever faced.
And in Episode Six of our Podcast, “Trump’s Project 2025, Up Close and Personal,” we explore just how inhumane it would get.
We examine a detention camp through the eyes of a prison guard (narrated by Mark Ruffalo) and a child who tries to escape (narrated by Andrea Guidry).
You can LISTEN to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or by linking HERE.
Also, please share the story so others know just how inhumane the scale of what Trump is talking about would be.
Then work as hard as you can to keep this nightmate from happening.
Author’s Note: The Horrible Specifics of the Trump Plan
In a lengthy New York Times article, Trump and his leading advisers on immigration, including Stephen Miller, explained details of their deportation plan:
“[Trump] plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year….To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
…Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized….
“Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.
[B]ecause of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.
[Stephen] Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”
He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security….
Such camps could also enable the government to speed up the pace and volume of deportations of undocumented people who have lived in the United States for years and so are not subject to fast-track removal. If pursuing a long-shot effort to win permission to remain in the country would mean staying locked up in the interim, some may give up and voluntarily accept removal without going through the full process….
“[S]tate National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.”
Project 2025
Dovetailing with these ominous and explicit Trump plans, Project 2025 pushes a wide range of anti-immigration policies, including that the US should “[e]liminate T and U visas,” the visas that protect victims of human trafficking as well as crime within the United States. Why would you ever get rid of those? The plan explains: “Victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit….Pending elimination of the T and U visas, the Secretary should significantly restrict eligibility for each visa to prevent fraud.” (Page 141)
Project 2025 also calls for ending policies that ensure minimal safeguards for detention camps (including the conditions for children), and calls for “authority for low-level temporary capacity (for example, tents) once permanent space is full. (Page 151). Tents are currently not permitted.
Trump’s former ICE director, and contributor to Project 2025, promised: “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” when it comes to the planned immigration crackdown.
The Warning from History
Immigration experts and historians warn that together, these policies, their scale and justification, risk returning to some of the darkest days in American and world history:
Here’s an expert in Newsweek: “Trump's advisors have already laid out plans to loosen migrant detention standards to enable the creation of sprawling detention camps in a haunting reimagining of the WWII internment camps that held Japanese Americans.”
And Scientific American: “Unleashed on anything close to the scale under discussion, the project Trump and his henchmen are proposing will be lethal to the targeted groups, catastrophic to the stability of the country and extremely difficult to undo.”
This article explores the appalling history of similar-sized (even smaller) efforts in the past:
“Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide—the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention—draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power…”
“The “Mass Deportation Now” signs filling the audience at the Republican National Convention are a grim warning of how much worse the situation could get. Trump, his advisers, the Heritage Foundation (the extreme-right platform that has put forth Project 2025) and countless members of Congress are not only winking and nodding toward detention horrors of the past but also clearly willing to repeat history if it will let them consolidate power.”
This is all very real, and very scary. Do NOT let it happen.
For a detailed look at all the Project 2025 proposals on immigration, go HERE and HERE.
NEW Episode: Mass Deportation