Trump and Illegal Immigration: How Mass Deportations Could Happen
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Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, November 17th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.

Donald Trump's plans to carry out his mass deportation pledge are taking shape. He's picked his so-called border czar, tapped an immigration hardliner as his deputy chief of staff, and his advisors are hard at work discussing the details about how an aggressive deportation effort that Trump has said could target as many as 20 million people could be carried out and paid for. So what is the plan? Let's get to it.

My Wall Street Journal colleagues Michelle Hackman and Andrew Restuccia began reporting in May that Donald Trump's allies were already drawing up proposals to make sure candidate Trump's rhetoric on immigration would actually make its way into policy if elected.

As a part of those discussions, Tom Homan's name was floated as someone who could help carry out this by serving as a border czar, a position that wouldn't require Senate confirmation. And sure enough, we learned this week that Homan is getting that job. The latest signal that Trump's policies really were being plotted out then and that ducks are now being put in a row. Michelle, take us into the plans that we're hearing about starting with perhaps day one, because it sounds like Trump is ready to hit the ground running here.

So one of the really big questions for how to do a mass deportation is all the available estimates are that if you want to deport millions of people, which governments haven't really been able to do, you'd need tens of billions, possibly even $100 billion to do that. And how do you unlock that money? So one of the solutions that they've come up with is that they're going to bring back, Trump did this in his last term, he declared a national emergency at the border. And this is under legal dispute, but they believe doing that would unlock money from the

Pentagon, that they could start using aid to rebuild Trump's border wall and also to pay for some of the things that would be needed for mass deportation, more officers to do arrests, more detention space to hold people, especially families if they want to deport people, more planes to actually fly people because, you know, people have been coming to the U.S. from countries around the world. It's a complex operation that they're looking at.

Do we know the likely order in which deportations would take place? What are we looking at logistically as this potentially gets underway? We have a few different data points. Trump has said he wants to deport 20 million people. Well, we don't even know if there are 20 million people in the country illegally that could be deported.

Tom Homan, Trump's incoming border czar, has narrowed that significantly. He said his big focuses are immigrants in the country illegally who have also committed another crime, as well as immigrants who have already received a final order of deportation in immigration court. People believe that that number is about 1.3 million people. And between those two populations, that will take a long time to just get through that list.

Andrew, I guess there are other groups, right, that have been targeted maybe beyond that 1.3 million people. Yeah, that's right. Homan has also said in recent days that he plans to ramp up workplace raids around the country to suss out and find people who are living here illegally. So that will be another path through which they would be able to deport people. He has said that he's not planning community by community raids of homes, at least not at the moment. But we'll have to wait and see how all that unfolds as the years go by. Some

Some of the struggles that Trump ran into in the first term was that his policies ran into opposition in Democratic-run cities and states. To what extent does an effort in the second term here hinge on cooperation from states that might not be on board with this?

They're not expecting blue states to all of a sudden come around and cooperate necessarily. They've discussed recruiting local and state officials from nearby red states to potentially do some of this work. And they're also talking about state and local law enforcement, National Guard as well to carry this out. I mean, it would require thousands and thousands of people around the country to actually make this happen.

That certainly sounds like the kind of thing that could get some politicians across the political spectrum incensed, right? Cross-border law enforcement participating in this.

You have to imagine that sending people into blue states, the majority of immigrants actually live in blue states in places like New York, California, now Chicago. You know, if you don't have the cooperation of local law enforcement who actually know those communities, that's when you tend to see operations that become a little uglier of people sort of banging down doors of searching through areas where a lot of Latinos live. And so the images of a mass deportation, that's where they could come about.

Andrew, in terms of operations, as Michelle mentioned there, that could become a little uglier, going back to Trump's first term, we saw this pattern of family separation. Has the incoming administration said anything about the possibility that might inevitably follow from a mass deportation effort? They're being a little bit coy about if they would arrive that policy. But Tom Homan, who was just appointed the border czar...

was a sort of champion of that policy dating well before President Trump's first term, way back to the Obama administration when he was a career government official. He raised that issue of separating children from their families, and now he's in the chair, and he has made no apologies for it. In an interview, he was asked, you know, what's the best way to avoid separating families? And he said sending the children home with their parents, back to their home countries. Just to go back to logistics here, even 1.3 million people is a very large number to deport.

Michelle, have we heard any sort of timeline about how quickly the administration thinks this could take place? I don't think that they've made any promises to that extent. They've set a really lofty goal for themselves. I just want to put in perspective that the last Trump administration tried hard to deport people and they deported just about 1.2 million across their four years.

And only a quarter of those arrests were made inside the country. So three quarters were people who had just crossed the border illegally, who the government was able effectively to just push back across the border or grab as soon as they caught them at the border and fly them back to places like Guatemala. If you're starting at a base of 300,000 people who were in the country who got deported last time, they have a lot of work to do to get up to the numbers that they're talking about.

All right, we've got to take a very short break, but when we come back, we'll talk about how all of this would be paid for, whether Trump's deportation plans are likely to meet legal challenges, and much more. Stay with us. Your business deploys AI pilots everywhere. But are they going anywhere? Or are they stuck in silos, exhausting resources, unable to scale? Maybe you don't need hundreds of AI pilots. You need a holistic strategy.

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We've got a whole lot more details to try and game out about Trump's likely looming deportation effort. Michelle, you mentioned before the break the fact that a lot of arrests occurred outside of the U.S. in Trump's first term. We have been talking about the steps his administration wants to take in the coming months, but this will inevitably again involve other countries, won't it?

That's right. So in the past, when we've talked about mass deportations, we've mostly been deporting to Mexico. But a big change we saw under the Biden administration was that people were crossing the border illegally from all over the world. And so this is going to become a much more complex diplomatic operation of talking to countries, particularly the ones we don't have good relationships with, to sort of coerce them to take back their citizens.

Marc Thiessen: Michelle, do we have a sense of some of these other countries that might be engaged? Michelle Plonka: Yeah. So it's a question of what type of negotiation you're talking about. But one thing that the Trump team is really interested in is creating what are called third safe country agreements with other countries. Trump very briefly tried it with Guatemala, but now they're interested in looking at countries all across Latin America and Africa that the U.S. can essentially pay to take on our asylum seekers.

Adding to the complexity of all this, too, and we didn't really get to this before the break, but one group that is potentially being targeted with deportation are those with temporary protected status. That's people who are in the U.S. as a result of fleeing humanitarian situations around the world as far as Ukraine. So sending people back to Central America doesn't seem like it's going to work in every case.

That's right. Yeah. And one of the big things is that the Trump team believes a lot of these people who we consider in the country illegally are actually here on some quasi legal humanitarian status that gives them deportation protections. And the thing is that Trump could basically take those away at any moment. And he has promised to do that. He said, I don't believe in deportation.

temporary protected status that's protecting anyone from Ukrainians to Haitians to Venezuelans. And he's saying, I'm going to end that and take it away. And that makes people vulnerable to deportation. And I think that's something he plans on acting on. Andrew, are we likely to see pushback to any of this from Congress, from the administration, especially if the roster of those targeted with deportation starts to expand, as Michelle was alluding to there?

Absolutely. I mean, you'll see aggressive pushback from members of Congress, particularly Democrats, but potentially some moderate Republicans, depending on how far Trump goes. And of course, you'll see legal challenges from Democratic attorneys general, from human rights groups like the ACLU. They'll be looking for any sort of mistake in any of these regulations and executive orders that they can take advantage of to overturn them. Michelle, could you expand on what likely legal challenges to this might look like?

I'll give you one example. In the latter part of Trump's first term, he appointed Chad Wolf, his acting Homeland Security secretary. But basically, he did it wrong. He basically read the org chart wrong, elevated the wrong person. And once people figured that out, they were able to challenge anything that Chad Wolf signed, a regulation, a memo, and say that that was issued improperly. And they won all of those cases and all of those policies got struck down.

Andrew, going back to politics, is broad immigration reform in the cards at all, separate from the deportation push we've been talking about here? Lawmakers have been trying to pass broad immigration reform for well over a decade now, and they've largely failed. For about 40 years. Yeah, I should say, yeah. And they've largely failed in part because neither party has a whole lot of incentive to help the other party score this major victory, and that's exactly what happened last

when Trump swooped in and killed the immigration bill most recently. But they may not need Democrats this time around. They can use a sort of budgetary maneuver called budget reconciliation to at least get the money they need to pass this. And the money that we're talking about is potentially huge. A liberal immigration group estimates that it could be about $88 billion a year to deport every single one of the migrants that are living in the country illegally. So this is a huge amount of money.

A huge amount of money and an action that could itself have an economic impact if millions of people are pulled out of the workforce, right, Andrew? Trump and his team, at least publicly, are pretty dismissive of the economic effects of this. Obviously, we know from talking to economists and immigration analysts that this country depends in part on the work of people living here illegally. And if we overnight or even over the course of a year removed all these people from the labor market, it could really send some convulsions across the economy.

We are fast running out of time, so I'll close with a final question for each of you. Michelle, maybe starting with you, as we look ahead to January and these plans potentially getting underway, what are you preparing for? What are your eyes on as an immigration reporter? I'll be watching really closely for some of the things I talked about. So what new ideas is this team coming up with to be able to ramp up deportations to much larger levels than they were able to last time? And B, how do they get to most of these immigrants? It's going to be hard if

They're living in places where those local officials are refusing to cooperate. Michelle, it sounds like the courts, not just in terms of legal challenges to any deportation efforts, but just in terms of the backlog of cases that they've got are going to be one of the real bottlenecks here.

Yeah, immigrants in this country do have some due process rights. If you've been living here for more than a couple years, and we arrest you and try to deport you, you have the right to go to court and fight your deportation case. And so right now, those courts are so backlogged that it's taking years to even get to those cases. So the other thing they're going to have to do is either find a way to circumvent that process or try to really, really speed it up so they can get those deportation orders.

And Andrew, what elements of this, obvious or otherwise, are you preparing to look into closely? One thing would be the politics of this. So we know from polling that the majority of Americans have been sort of clamoring for some sort of crackdown at the border. The question is, do the Trump people overcorrect? Do they go too far? And do they end up doing it in a way that actually repulses voters in the midterms in two years or in the next presidential election?

I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal reporters Andrew Restuccia and Michelle Hackman. Andrew, thank you so much for the time. Thank you. And Michelle, a pleasure as always. Thank you. Thank you, too. And that's it for What's News Sunday for November 17th. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg with Anthony Bansi and with supervising producer Christina Rocca and deputy editors Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley. I'm Luke Vargas, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.

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