Donald Trump is pledging to make good on his immigration crackdown campaign promise when he takes office—no matter the cost. “There is no price tag,” he told NBC News on Thursday, saying he has “no choice” but to carry out his plans to conduct what he’s described as “the largest deportation effort in American history.”
“We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful,” the president-elect said.
As in his first successful White House bid, Trump made immigration a defining issue of his 2024 campaign. He and Vice President-elect JD Vance have proposed ending birthright citizenship, removing Haitians who are legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, and reinstating travel bans, among other plans. And while Trump suggested to NBC News that “we want people to come into our country” legally, he has also suggested restricting legal immigration.
But the centerpiece of his anti-immigration agenda—this cycle’s “build the wall”—is mass deportation: “We have become a dumping ground for the world,” Trump said in his dark address at the Republican National Convention this summer. “They’re not going to be getting away with it for long,” Trump told his supporters, vowing to carry out a deportation campaign “even larger” than Dwight Eisenhower’s brutal “Operation Wetback” program in the ‘50s.
The logistics of Trump’s plan remain unclear: As of 2022, there were about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to a Department of Homeland Security estimate. During Trump’s first term, as CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet noted Thursday, his administration carried out 1.5 million deportations, at a cost of nearly $11,000 each. Vance said in August that he would like to deport a million undocumented immigrants per year, just as a “start”: “Then we can go from there,” he told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.
How would a second Trump administration scale up its deportation campaign that much? Vance floated a “sequential approach”; anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller has suggested the military would be involved; and Trump himself has proposed invoking the two-century-old Alien Enemies Act that the United States government previously used to detain nationals of German, Italian, and Japanese descent during World War II. But the details, as is usually the case with Trump, are scant.
Which doesn’t mean he won’t forge ahead anyway. While Trump’s stupidity and laziness sometimes derailed the ugly ambitions of his first term, the haphazard execution often served to make bad policy even worse—especially when it came to immigration measures like his family separation program, the cruelty of which was exacerbated by the chaos of its implementation. The complex logistical challenges of Trump’s anti-immigration fantasies may not be obstacles in the way of them being realized, as some have suggested; they may, instead, ensure that their implementation is even more reckless.
