Nov 13, 2024

Trump's mass deportation plan.

Plus, a reader question about family separation.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

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We preview what the next Trump administration's immigration policies could look like. Plus, a reader question about family separation.

Correction.

In our newsletter yesterday, we referred to Gov. Kristi Noem once correctly as (R-SD) and another time incorrectly as (R-ND). Few mistakes are as annoying as something like this, especially as we had just committed a similar mistake with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and tried to triple-check our identifiers in this edition. Apologies to our readers from the beautiful Dakotas — we know your two states are different.

This is our 119th correction in Tangle's 275-week history and our first correction since yesterday (woof). We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.


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Our post-mortem is coming.

Since Election Day, we’ve seen a lot of post-mortems, explanations, and blame games for what happened in the 2024 election. In Friday’s members-only newsletter, we’re sharing ours. Keep your eyes peeled.


Quick hits.

  1. President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. (The nomination) Additionally, Trump will nominate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for U.S. ambassador to Israel. (The nomination) Trump also announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) focused on cutting government spending and streamlining bureaucracy. (The announcement)
  2. President-elect Trump reportedly plans to halt a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. if it goes into effect next year. A bill passed by Congress in April requires the social media app to find a new owner not based in China by January or lose access to U.S. users. (The report)
  3. Jack Teixeira, a former Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking classified intelligence documents detailing U.S. surveillance of adversaries and allies. (The sentence)
  4. The Biden administration said it will not limit arms transfers to Israel after determining that the country was making satisfactory progress toward increasing the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. (The decision)
  5. A U.S. jury awarded $42 million in damages to three former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, determining that they had been subject to torture and mistreatment while imprisoned. (The award)

Today's topic.

Trump's mass deportation plan. In the week after the election, President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally. He has also started identifying high-ranking immigration officials to carry out the policy.

Trump has brought on Stephen Miller, a longtime immigration hardliner, as his deputy chief of staff. He chose Tom Homan, a former ICE director and the face of some of Trump's most restrictive policies from his first term, as "border czar." He has also chosen Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who supported his first term’s travel ban on select Muslim-majority countries, to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

You can see our full coverage of Trump's cabinet and staff picks here.

In a Truth Social post announcing Homan's role, Trump said he would be “in charge of our Nation’s Borders” and “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin."

In a Fox News interview on Monday, Homan said the deportation effort would prioritize "public safety and national security threats" as well as migrants who had disobeyed court orders to leave the country. Last month, Homan told 60 Minutes that the plan would not be a "mass sweep of neighborhoods" or involve "building concentration camps," calling such accusations "ridiculous." Instead, he said the plan would amount to targeted arrests of the most dangerous criminals in the country, noting that the country has over 1.5 million convicted criminal unauthorized migrants with final orders of removal, including thousands of gang members.

Homan also defended some of Trump's most controversial policies, including family separation, which was barred by a federal judge until 2031. When asked if mass deportations could be carried out without separating families, Homan suggested families "can be deported together." 

The scale and scope of the deportation plan is still unclear, and enacting it will present legal and logistical challenges. The U.S. has limited detention space to house migrants who may be arrested and prepared for deportation. Immigrant rights groups have also promised to resist the administration’s efforts. Juan Proano, the CEO of League of United Latin American Citizens , the oldest Hispanic civil rights group in the U.S., said his group is already raising money and hiring lawyers to fight Trump’s “ruthless” policies.

In Mexico, where more than half of all unauthorized migrants originate, immigration advocates say neither shelters nor the border are prepared to take in potentially millions of deportees, many of whom are jobless or have been out of the country for years.

Today, we are going to examine some arguments about Trump’s mass deportation plan from the right and left, then my take.


What the right is saying.

  • The right backs Trump’s deportation plan, but some warn that he must be discerning in its execution. 
  • Many say large-scale deportations are needed after record unauthorized migration during the Biden administration.
  • Others argue the plan represents a return to the rule of law. 

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about “Trump’s mass deportation promise.”

“In short order, Mr. Trump will move to reinstate the border policies of his first term, such as Remain in Mexico, which seemed to work. Under that deal, migrants claiming asylum in the U.S. were sent back to Mexico while their cases were pending, which might take months or more. The idea was to break the incentives to game the system. Given the backlog of asylum cases, letting migrants into the U.S. while they wait is an enticement to come,” the board said. “The political rub may be Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to conduct ‘the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.’ How it goes depends on what Mr. Trump means.”

“Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including [Stephen Miller], have talked about mass deportation in sweeping terms. But enforcement priorities are up to the President, and Mr. Trump has suggested he isn’t interested in illegal grandmothers,” the board wrote. “The public backs him on securing the border and reducing the burden that migrants have put on cities across the country. But as Mr. Trump appears to realize, support will ebb if the public sees crying children as their parents are deported, or reads stories of long-settled families broken up and ‘dreamers’ brought here illegally as children deported to countries that they no longer remember.”

In The Washington Examiner, Byron York made “the case for mass deportations.”

“Variations in wording aside, when Trump talks about mass deportation, he is talking about the mass deportation of criminals. It’s hard to imagine opposing Trump’s proposal. Who would want to help murderers and drug dealers who entered the country illegally remain in the United States? Yet we have seen much talk that Trump deportation plans go far, far beyond criminals and will ultimately lead to 10 million, 15 million, or perhaps even 20 million people being removed from the country,” York said. “The Trump plan has been visible in plain sight for quite a while. First, the new administration will seek to deport quickly those illegal immigrants who are deemed national security threats. At the same time, it will pursue illegal immigrants with criminal records, either in the U.S. or some other country.”

“Trump’s actions, if he takes them, could certainly be characterized as ‘mass deportations’ since they would involve the removal of perhaps 1 million people. It would certainly be ‘the largest deportation of criminals in American history.’ On one hand, it would not please the Trump supporters who want to deport every single person in the U.S. illegally. After all, every illegal border crosser has violated U.S. law by unlawfully entering the country. On the other hand, prioritized deportations would be a significant restoration of the rule of law as it applies to the U.S. border, and that would be a very good thing.”

In The Daily Signal, Simon Hankinson criticized the “mass hysteria over deportation.”

“For four years, Americans saw the results of the Biden administration refusing to enforce the law—from more preventable crimes to overtaxed schools, housing, and hospitals. They saw millions of inadmissible foreigners allowed to enter the U.S.—despite having no visa—and then stay indefinitely through quasi-legal fudges of the law. They saw inadmissible aliens being fed, housed, and paid using our tax dollars,” Hankinson wrote. “Because Biden left a four-year deficit on national immigration law enforcement—at the border and inside the country—the Trump administration will have to catch up. There are over 1.3 million illegal aliens with official removal (deportation) orders still in the U.S. They’ve had their due process, and now they should be removed.”

“As our elected leaders do their jobs, and as the men and women sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and the rule of law get back to business, expect all eyes to be on them. There will be hyperbole, spin, selective media coverage, and even outright lies in much of the national media that will make the press’ partisanship during Trump’s first term look like objectivity,” Hankinson said. “But don’t believe the hype. The rule of law is the rock on which this republic is built. A return to that now will seem odd at first, but it is proper, long overdue, and deserving of public support.”


What the left is saying.

  • The left criticizes the deportation plan, with some suggesting it will lead to an economic downturn.
  • Many say the effort is morally indefensible. 
  • Others say the plan will punish other countries for the United States’s internal problems. 

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman argued “Trump’s deportations will drive up your grocery bill.”

“With the economy starting from, essentially, full employment in his second term, Trump, with mass deportations, would degrade productive capacity, balloon deficits and — yes — bring inflation roaring back, keeping a grim pledge on punitive immigration policy while breaking one on providing relief to American consumers,” Krugman wrote. “Here’s what I mean: If you’re upset about grocery prices now, see what happens if Trump goes after a huge part of the agricultural work force; immigrants are around three-quarters of agricultural workers — and roughly half of them are undocumented.”

“When it comes to the downstream economic effects of deportations, it’s not just about grocery prices; it’s also about the cost of housing. The answer to that problem is to build more housing units. But undocumented immigrants are more than a fifth of the construction work force, so deportations would severely hamper efforts to increase the housing supply,” Krugman said. “Could we easily make up for the loss of these workers by replacing them with native-born workers? No. Employment among native-born adults in their prime working years is higher than it was at any point during Trump’s first term. There just isn’t a large pool of idle but employable native-born Americans to put to work.”

In The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper wrote “Trump voters are about to learn he meant what he said.”

“Now that Donald Trump has won, again, a furious debate on the left side of the political spectrum has erupted, as Democratic Party factions jostle for position by casting blame on everyone but themselves,” Cooper said. “A more interesting conundrum, however, is the maddening fact that Trump paid little or no electoral penalty for his numerous hideously unpopular positions. A developing body of evidence suggests that a critical mass of voters simply did not hear about these positions, or did not believe them if they did.”

“Even if Trump only manages a tenth of what he promises, the deportations are going to be an atrocity for the record books. By way of comparison, about 12 million Germans fled or were deported out of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and about 600,000 of them died in the process. Now, back in the U.S., fascist thugs—possibly deputized sheriffs and cops—will be busting into houses, dragging families out of their beds, and herding them into concentration camps that are certain to be overcrowded, filthy, and disease-ridden. The construction and agriculture industries, where one-fifth and one-half the workforces, respectively, are undocumented, will be dealt a savage blow.”

In The Washington Post, Eduardo Porter said “the world will foot the bill” for Trump’s immigration policy.

“On Nov. 5, Election Day in the United States, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stepped before the news media to point out a drastic decline in the number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border from around the world, largely because of Mexico’s efforts,” Porter wrote. “It should be no surprise that she is so willing to be helpful. Donald Trump closed his campaign in North Carolina by threatening to impose tariffs on Mexican goods ranging from 25 to 100 percent until it stopped the movement of migrants. He has also threatened 200 percent tariffs on Mexican-made cars, mass deportations that would push millions of migrants into Mexico and deployment of the military south of the border to combat drug cartels.

“To a foreign observer, America’s quest for redress around the world is hard to understand. The United States is not only the most prosperous nation on Earth, but also it is pulling further ahead of its peers, growing faster than other affluent economies… What ultimately motivates Trump’s voters is that the United States has done a dismal job of distributing the gains from these global wins,” Porter said. “That’s not other countries’ fault, however. That’s the fault of a political system unwilling to address the social downsides of the many changes, whether technological, economic or demographic, that modernity has brought about.”


My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

  • Trump may not have a mandate on some issues, but he clearly does on immigration.
  • Deporting people who have crossed the border illegally and broken laws once arriving in the country sounds totally reasonable and just to me.
  • My biggest concern is over the difference between Trump’s campaign and president-elect rhetoric.

Whenever a new president is elected, you’ll hear a lot of talk about “policy mandates." Looking at this election, I don't necessarily buy that Trump has a "total mandate" or one any greater than the last few presidents have had.

Yes, Republicans won the Senate and will win the House narrowly. But Trump is also on pace to have a thinner popular vote victory than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and if Republicans are honest with themselves they know their margins are not as vast as they're claiming publicly. If they want to hold on to the House in 2026, and the White House and Senate in 2028, I don't suspect they’ll legislate as if they are politically invincible.

That being said, I do think Trump has a mandate on immigration. It's inarguable to me that Trump and his administration's version of immigration policy is the one the vast majority of Americans prefer. It is the bedrock his political career has been built on since 2016. Trump flip-flops on, speaks squishily around or all-out avoids a lot of issues, but he has never wavered on immigration.

So: I fully expect him to pursue a broad deportation effort. I also expect him to re-implement his border policies. Trump will want to posture in a way to discourage migrants from even coming here; his very presence in the White House is going to act as a deterrent, and we're already seeing the impact. I think as the leader of the executive branch — with the Senate, House, and American public at his back — he does have the mandate to pursue immigration policies in full. That doesn't mean he can violate the law, but it does mean his administration will enact stricter immigration policies that will likely be supported by the public.

I've already explained why I don't fear the "collapse of democracy" under Trump. Similarly, I also can't help but scoff when reading writers like Ryan Cooper (under "what the left is saying") invoke post-World War II Germany and "atrocities for the record books," "fascist thugs," and "concentration camps" while discussing a plan to deport unauthorized migrants with violent criminal records. Might law enforcement use unnecessary force to arrest unauthorized migrants with violent criminal records? Almost definitely. Do I expect these deportations to require routine violence, police-involved shootings, or deaths? No. Maybe I’ll eat my words on that, but we could at least save the Holocaust comparisons. 

And yet, I do fear this deportation plan more than most of Trump's other policies. Not because I think it's unjust or immoral. If you are here illegally and committing violent crimes — or disobeying deportation orders — then your arrest or deportation actually seems just and moral. I don’t think it should be controversial to pursue a functioning immigration system by enforcing the law. I fear the plan because I'm still not clear on exactly what it will look like — because Trump's campaign rhetoric is often different from his president-elect rhetoric.

Byron York (under “what the right is saying) said that 15–20 million people won’t be deported under this policy; yet, that’s exactly what Donald Trump promised while campaigning. During Trump's first term, and before I started Tangle, I reported on faith leaders across the country who were hiding migrants in their places of worship to avoid arrest and deportation; I imagine this kind of resistance will manifest again, and if Trump really attempts a zero-tolerance policy we are likely to get some very ugly scenes.

This, of course, is to say nothing of the fact that if Trump's deportation effort begins to target migrants who are here illegally but are not breaking any other laws and are part of the labor force, business leaders will start to complain. Then we'll see local economies impacted. And, depending on how sweeping the order is, those impacts could be broad. These are my fears, but they are largely dependent on the scale of what the Trump administration actually does.

On the other hand, Trump's second term poses yet another gigantic opportunity for Congress to actually fix our immigration system for the long term. Trump's deportation plan, if targeted and organized, could be a part of the short-term fix and return a sense of order to the country while also giving Republicans a big win on the issue to take to any negotiating table. Then, for a long-term fix, my solutions to the border crisis remain in play:

We need to tighten the asylum process (Biden has started this, and it's worked), we need more border security (Trump will probably do this), and then we need to implement verification for employers, rein in parole, offer a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients, increase the number of legal work permits and massively scale up the number of judges, lawyers, and asylum officers at the border so we can clear the backlog of millions of asylum cases by actually adjudicated their claims and then admitting or deporting them accordingly.

Democrats were willing to play ball on parts of this plan when Biden was president, but Trump directed Republicans to block those attempts to ensure Biden didn't get a late-term victory. Now, as the minority party, Democrats should still be willing to come to the table, and Republicans should end the campaign-season charade and find some common ground while they have both leverage and a mandate from the American people. There's a lot of work to get done outside of deporting millions of people or building walls, and the sooner we get there the better.

Take the survey: What do you think of a future deportation effort in Trump’s next term? Let us know!

Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.


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Your questions, answered.

Q: You rather neutrally described Homan with the words “he remains a proponent of family separation” without describing this policy as a human rights violation. What is Tangle’s policy for providing context to readers when a proposed policy is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and/or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

— John from Silver Spring, MD

Tangle: Yes, we have a policy of using neutral labels for controversial ideas to try to keep as many readers as possible from having a knee-jerk response to our topics before they get a chance to engage with different ideas. To be clear: If a controversial event results in a definitive legal outcome, like Roe v. Wade being overturned or Donald Trump being convicted on felony charges, we will describe those outcomes definitively.

However, the policy of separating migrant families when their parents have crossed the border illegally has not been definitively and legally described as a human rights violation by the UN.

Plenty of articles have argued that this policy should be called a human rights violation. Amnesty International has argued the policy resulted in human rights violations. The group Children’s Rights has argued that the policy was a violation of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. And both the American Bar Association as well as the Columbia Human Rights Law Review have called the policy illegal under U.S. law. 

Those arguments are pretty convincing, and we would say that family separations at the border constituted a violation of those children’s rights. And although a federal judge did prohibit the policy for eight years, he fell short of labeling it outright illegal. Therefore, we couldn’t accurately give this policy a black-and-white label as either illegal or as a human rights violation.

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Under the radar.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced that oil and natural gas companies will pay a federal fee if they emit methane above prescribed limits. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule says that excess methane produced in 2024 could result in a fee of $900 per ton, with fees rising to $1,200 per ton in 2025 and $1,500 per ton by 2026. Methane, which is a more powerful (although more short-lived) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, is responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the oil and natural gas sector being the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. The EPA says the rule is designed to encourage early deployment of available technologies to reduce methane emissions and other harmful air pollutants. However, the rule will not go into effect until early 2025, and President-elect Trump could reverse course as part of a planned deregulatory agenda when he takes office. The Associated Press has the story.


Numbers.

  • 62%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they favor the U.S. government starting a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally, according to a June 2024 CBS News poll. 
  • 62%. The percentage of U.S. adults who would favor local law enforcement trying to identify which people were U.S. citizens and which were undocumented immigrants as part of a national deportation program. 
  • 27%. The percentage of Harris supporters who favor mass deportations, according to a September 2024 Pew Research poll. 
  • 88%. The percentage of Trump supporters who favor mass deportations. 
  • 33%. The percentage of U.S. Hispanics who say increasing deportations of people who are in the country illegally would help the border situation, according to a March 2024 Pew Research poll.
  • 55%. The percentage of other U.S. adults who say increasing deportations would help the border situation. 
  • 41%. The percentage of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. who held no work authorization between 2018 and 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
  • 14%. The percentage of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. who held no work authorization between 1989 and 1991.

The extras.

  • One year ago today we wrote about Joe Manchin’s retirement.
  • The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was Republicans retaining a House majority.
  • Nothing to do with politics: Mike Tyson will be fighting Jake Paul on Friday; here are some of Iron Mike’s career highlights.
  • Yesterday’s survey: 1,805 readers responded to our survey asking which Trump appointments they approve of with 73% supporting the selection of Susie Wiles as chief of staff. “It makes sense that he would favor Wiles for running a relatively smooth and clearly productive campaign. The rest of his cast of characters, save Rubio, are relatively unknown to me,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

In the 1960s, India’s “Green Revolution” favored farming rice and wheat — crops with high yields. However, monocropping requiring frequent use of pesticides and fertilizers caused biodiversity in the nation to suffer. But the reintroduction of millets to India’s agriculture could help. Millets are energy and water efficient, which could save India 50 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and 300 billion cubic meters of water each year. This, combined with their incredible health benefits, makes their recultivation an exciting prospect. Reasons To Be Cheerful has the story.


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Isaac Saul
I'm a politics reporter who grew up in Bucks County, PA — one of the most politically divided counties in America. I'm trying to fix the way we consume political news.