The first appointments in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet indicate that border security and immigration restrictions will be a central focus of his administration. But what does this mean for immigrants, their families, their communities and what mass deportations could look like.
Experts agree that it is difficult to imagine a large-scale deportation like the one planned by the new administration, because the resources do not exist. However, in the desire to achieve this, they can fall into illegality, civil violations, create a negative impact on the economy and sow intimidation and fear in communities.
During the videoconference “What Trump’s victory means for immigrants and what could happen”, organized by Ethnic Media Servicesimmigration experts broke down Trump’s immigration priorities and analyzed the potential consequences for immigrants and the country as a whole.
Mass deportations
Jeremy Robbins, CEO of the American Immigration Council, He said the current immigration detention capacity in the country is about 50,000, but if they are talking about deporting 13 million people, one would have to ask if new facilities need to be built and where.
“Right now the court backlog is more than a million cases. It takes about five years to decide whether someone should get asylum. So they need a new set of judges and asylums, and see how they are going to bring people home.”
Robbins said if all of this were to be done, it would cost about $315 billion and if it were to deport a million people a year, it would be about $80 billion a year.
“Pretty much almost a trillion dollars in a decade.”
Intimidation and fear
Greg Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), said the new administration’s plans come with fear, intimidation, legality and economic impact.
“The Biden administration has already fully deployed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) resources to enforce the law. They’ve been pretty aggressive in what they’re doing. “They don’t have much more staff to do it, so they will be limited,” he said.
In relation to the intimidation factor, he said that there are people who, even having legal status, are calling lawyers, because they simply fear that they will be detained based on racial profiling.
He noted that the new administration’s plans to mobilize the Civil Guard who are not trained in immigration law will lead to civil rights violations.
As for the economic havoc that President Trump’s plans may wreak, the American Immigration Council has tried to estimate the impact on Arizona’s southern border, in the southwest corner of Yuma County, which relies heavily on the hand of immigrant labor for agriculture.
“Businesses are very concerned about making sure the workforce can meet their needs. “We are going to see devastation across the country of businesses and industries in almost every economic sector, and that is something that is not going to be good for the country.”
So in that sense, he said that mass deportation would not be a smart policy to push, especially since apparently the economy is the most important thing to voters.
The impact on communities
Elizabeth Taufa, an attorney and policy strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), said we also need to talk about the emotional and psychological effect on communities.
“The federal government does not have the resources to implement the mass deportation plan, but the campaign of fear and intimidation works, and has its impact on the emotional well-being of communities.”
He observed that the repercussions of mass deportation at the community level are seen in children who do not go to school because their parents are afraid of being deported.
“You see it in the shortage of health care workers because people move to states that are a little safer or they get kicked out of the country.”
He added that there are many people with temporary status, such as TPS and DACA, who are teachers, when we are already facing a shortage.
“This is going to hit rural communities much harder than urban areas.”
Lack of resources
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the immigration policy program at Migration Policy Institute (MPI), said they have heard threats to deport a million undocumented immigrants per year.
“The largest number of deportees from the interior of the United States was in 2009 with 238,000 deportations. So a mass deportation implies an enormous infusion of resources, an increase in personnel, detention centers, an increase in processes in immigration courts, more planes and more buses.”
Gelatt said it’s hard to imagine reaching the scale of mass deportation, which has been threatened.
However, he mentioned that just the noise around can make people afraid.
“So it’s very important that we put some limits on what is known, what is not known, and what might be possible. There are some tools that the incoming Trump administration could use to try to increase the scope such as the process of “accelerated expulsion”.
He argued that most deportations tend to be of people who have committed a serious crime or were caught driving without a license in a state where licenses are not available to them.
“Right now, local policies about not cooperating with ICE in holding people for deportation become very important. “Red (Republican) states have higher levels of transferring immigrants to federal immigration agents versus blue (Democratic) states that have such policies.”