Ever since President Donald Trump first descended into the American political arena via his gilded escalator, his presence has cast a dark shadow across the immigrant communities of this nation. While this inky mass originally came in the form of vague threats of a border wall or targets on sanctuary cities, it has recently transformed itself into something more tangible and sinister, its dark essence having now taken the form of the jet-black and deep-blue flak jackets worn by the various forces of law and order soon to be involved in Trump’s “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
In the eyes of the Editorial Board of The Fordham Ram, this deportation plan of Trump’s is an utter and contemptuous abomination. His plan poses vast humanitarian and legal concerns. Migrants may be subjected to the same disastrous detention conditions that they suffered under Trump’s first presidential term. Moreover, migrants who arrived legally through Biden-era policies may experience fast-tracked deportations that are not just inhumane but also fundamentally unconstitutional. It is also worth noting that Trump’s deportation project is built upon a set of fundamentally false and xenophobic claims. Despite his Hitler-esque rhetoric that illegal migrants are “animals” who pose an existential threat to the safety and “lifeblood” of America, numerous studies have shown time and time again that undocumented migrants commit significantly less crime than American citizens.
As pressing as these concerns are, the following editorial will not address them — working to justify a demographic group’s right to humane and constitutional treatment would be to engage with Trump’s xenophobic and dehumanizing claims as if they were in any way legitimate. What this editorial will address instead is the blunt, empirical fact that the execution of Trump’s deportation plan is impossible without tearing the American economy apart at its very seams.
In short, a constitutional deportation process is not as simple as just rounding up a group of presumed illegal immigrants, jamming them forcefully into an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) van and then setting them free at the nearest international border. Instead, it is a complex, multi-step process that requires a massive amount of effort, time and resources. For starters, potential illegal migrants need to be identified and tracked down via intensive intelligence efforts that are undertaken by a team of local law enforcement and immigration agents and officials from ICE. Any migrants that are identified must then be “housed or placed on an ‘alternative to detention’ programme” as they are forced into a beyond backed-up and complicated immigration court system. Should a migrant eventually receive a deportation order, they then must be taken back to their home country at the U.S. government’s expense. Simply put, the deportation process is an expensive and labor-intensive one, with America already struggling to foot the bill in its current pre-mass deportation state: ICE is currently “dealing with a $230 million budget shortfall, even before the costs that will be associated with mass deportations.”
Should Trump attempt to go through with his goal of deporting 13 million more illegal immigrants than what the current deportation levels stand at, the resulting strain on America’s resources would be disastrous. For one, the current administration would need to hire an innumerable amount of new ICE agents and staffers in order to find and process the millions of additional migrants that would be thrust into the immigration system. They would likewise have to invest in massive levels of new detention infrastructure, specifically needing “to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than [as] currently exists” so as to adequately house the influx of new detainees. There would also be astronomical new transportation costs incurred when transporting not only these 13 million new individuals across great distances, but also the new legions of American diplomats that would likewise need to travel internationally so as to negotiate their acceptance. In fact, when all this is said and done, the total financial burden that would be placed on the federal government and, by extension, the American taxpayer, to furnish Trump’s deportation is estimated to be $967.9 billion.
Consider also the major socioeconomic ripple effects that would result from an exodus of 3.3% of America’s population. At its core, mass deportation would also be a removal of a large portion of America’s taxpayers and workers. It would be ripping from the already-bleeding body of the American economy a demographic that not only contributes to Medicare, Social Security and tax initiatives en masse but also acts as the labor base for a glut of America’s key industries (e.g., construction, agriculture, hospitality services, etc.). This removal of such a significant amount of labor and government revenue would cripple American social safety net programs and American industries, and lead to the outright collapse of businesses and social programs — two things that would irrevocably impact every American, whether they are legal or illegal under the eyes of the law. Finally, the spending power of illegal migrant communities simply cannot be understated, as they help to prop up America’s local businesses, as well as its country’s chain and corporate retailers, by injecting $256.8 billion dollars a year into the U.S. economy.
While these figures are nauseating and horrifying, they are, of course, ultimately attached to a problem that runs so much deeper than statistics and projections. After all, each immigrant is a living, breathing human being with their own respective dreams to actualize, families to take care of and lives to live. To reduce these individuals down to statistics is, in a way, to strip them of the real, embodied emotional, psychological and physical damage that a mass deportation effort would effectively subject them to. However, these figures nevertheless are also emblematic of the real-world consequences and implications that this deportation plan will have on every single person who wakes up within the expansive confines of America’s superimposed borders. Thus, it is the opinion of the Editorial Board of The Fordham Ram that, as citizens, it is imperative to make it clear that this humanitarian and socioeconomic travesty of a deportation plan is not welcome in this country.
