The New Yorker Radio Hour - Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump's political career for nearly a decade now. His first presidential campaign was largely about building the wall to keep people out. In 2024, the focus has been on sending back immigrants who are already here. He's promised the largest deportation in history, millions of people. potentially, and it starts on day one, according to Trump. Stephen Miller said the administration would unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers

to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. A deportation policy on this scale would have enormous impact, not only on the lives of immigrants, but on their communities, on the U.S. economy, and much more. To understand what's really possible come January, I'm joined by staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who's the author of Everyone Who Is Gone is Here, a definitive account published this year of the immigration crisis in America. Jonathan, before we get into the prospect

of the Trump administration and a potential deportation, I want to ask you if you think, looking back on the now completed campaign, if the Democratic Party got immigration wrong, if the Biden administration ignored it for too long, as has been the question, critique all along from the Republicans. I definitely think the Democrats and Biden specifically miscalculated in thinking that if they

put their heads down and didn't talk about this, the issue would somehow pass or it would kind of dissolve in the general ether. And so they didn't really— Why would they do that? Well, it's tough news for Democrats all the time because the Republicans have a very simple, coherent message. You know, it's plain and it's forceful and it's pithy, and that is, you know, shut down the border, fewer people should enter the country, you know, America first. It's the whole litany.

Whereas Democrats have this issue of needing to communicate something more nuanced, balancing a kind of humanness with pragmatism at the border and beyond. And that's always been a hard message for Democrats. And they've always kind of toggled between trying to seem tough and trying to do things that at least are a little bit different than the Republicans, even though basically the tools in their arsenal aren't all that different. That said, the Biden administration, to my mind, made two sort of major policy miscalculations. The first was clinging to a Trump-era policy for too long. It ostensibly was very tough.

What it did was it allowed the government to summarily expel anyone who showed up at the southern border without giving them any real sense of due process or an opportunity to present claims for asylum. It seems like it would be an effective way of clearing the border when you need to for the federal government. But in fact, it actually had a series of counterproductive effects because the government. because the government was expelling people in mass without any sort of orderly system around it, people were trying to cross multiple times. It didn't really stand up the asylum system or any of the border processing mechanisms that the Trump administration in its first term had sabotaged. And so it allowed the Biden administration to have a kind of illusion of control over the border

when in fact the circumstances were really spiraling out of their control. That was the first thing. And the second thing, and the one that I actually think ultimately was more definitive in terms of how it impacted the election, was Governor Abbott, Greg Abbott in Texas, busing tens of thousands of recently arrived migrants to blue cities and states across the country. And DeSantis as well. DeSantis did it as well. Each one wanted to outdo the other. Desantis kind of famously flew migrants to Martha's Vineyard to make the point that how do you feel when it's in your backyard?

But can we agree then that it was diabolically effective as politics? Yes. I mean, I'll tell you, my conversations with top officials at the Department of Homeland Security all led to the same assessment, which was, you know, was Greg Abbott more so than it was, was Ron DeSantis kind of driving this reality, but that Abbott single-handedly changed the way immigration played as a political issue in America as a result of this busing. And to my mind, a profound mistake made by the administration was not intervening and doing something more active of its own. So, you know, what you had was you had all of these buses full of migrants being sent all across the country with the deliberate aim of causing chaos in cities and states far from the border.

There was no coordination. The governor of Texas, governor of Florida, were deliberately not giving heads up to local or state officials. And so it was really overwhelming cities across the country. If the Biden administration had bit the bullet and tried to take on some of that process itself. Why didn't they? They were scared of the politics. And what are the politics? You know, the politics were, I mean, the attacks would write themselves. The attacks would be, look what the Biden administration is doing. It's offering newly arrived immigrants, you know, bus tickets to whatever city they want. And that was the conversation inside the White House that, you know, the bruising political fight around this is going to be just too painful for us. And the operations themselves are complicated. No one's denying that it's complicated to draw up plans to kind of relieve pressure at the border. But the Biden administration essentially,

you know, was defensive and allowed someone like Greg Abbott to really run the table on them. Did it seem to you that this was partially responsible for the shift in votes in blue states like New York? I mean, I was struck by the fact that in some of the congressional districts in and around the suburbs of New York City, you had large numbers of people in response to polls saying that the border crisis was out of control. It was motivating their decision, you know, to vote the way they did. And what was so striking about that for me was, you know, for six or seven months, if not longer, before the election itself, the number of people arriving at the border had dropped substantially. And yet the perception in places like New York and beyond was that this was still an ongoing crisis because they were dealing with the following. Are you saying it merely a perception problem, not a reality problem?

No, I think it was both. I mean, I think the reality was undeniable that for, you know, cities and suburbs that were dealing with, you know, the recent arrival of relatively large numbers of people. for whom they were not prepared, I think that was a really acute strain on a number of local resources. I think it would have been manageable had the federal government been more proactive and had the messaging around it been a little bit more forthright.

The Democrats tend to think, you know, we lose on this issue because, you know, nuance loses against kind of big, broad, ugly attack lines from Republicans. But the net effect of it all is the public is just bombarded with the Republican line time and again. And there's really no counter-reactual. prevailing narrative rhetoric explanation that unpacks a little bit what's happening.

Now, on January 20th, Donald Trump becomes president and he has promises about day one and deportation. What is the rhetoric and what is going to be the reality? You know, I have to say candidly, I don't know what's coming. I mean, we know that there's going to be all, every manner of harshness. But the mechanics of mass deportation are complicated. And so it's unclear to me, you know, when people like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's top immigration advisor and now someone who's going to play a very influential role in the new White House say, as he has said recently, that the incoming administration is going to deport up to a million people a year, people should be skeptical of that number, the magnitude of that number. There's a huge amount of logistical coordination that would be required for that to work. How many undocumented immigrants are there? Well, there are upwards of 11 million undocumented people living in the United States, the majority of whom it should be said, have lived here for more than a decade.

Right. And so, to my mind, one of the scariest things about what's coming is the randomness of the roundups and arrests. So, you know, one of the things that has guided enforcement policy, certainly among Democrats over the recent years, is in light of the fact that there are so many undocumented immigrants who have been living in the United States who can't regularize the government. status because Congress is deadlocked. The government has to prioritize who it goes after. For instance, people have committed crimes, you know, the whole kind of specific list of things. What they're effectively saying is, okay, if you haven't committed crimes, if the only issue you have is that you've overstayed a visa or that, you know, 15 years ago you crossed the border without authorization, we're going to deprioritize you for arrest to such a degree that you really do not have to

look over your shoulder all the time. The Trump ethos, and it's explicit and was explicit in the first term, is if you're undocumented, you're fair game. You should be looking over your shoulder. Here's Stephen Miller describing what he thinks is going to happen on the day of inauguration. He will immediately sign executive orders, sealing the border shut, beginning the largest deportation operation in American history, finding the criminal gangs, rapist, drug dealers, and monsters that have murdered our citizens and sending them home, no one will be allowed to enter the country illegally and ICE will be empowered in partnership with FBI, DEA, ATF, the National Guard to fully seal and secure the border with CBP and to find and identify the criminal

threats that are inside this country and send them back home. Okay, Jonathan, maybe you should break down what Stephen Miller is saying. Yeah. In the first administration, Trump came into office with Miller and the whole lot of them, all planning to ramp up arrests and deportations from the interior of the country. So in other words, people who have been living here for many years who are undocumented whose legal status has lapsed and so on, they were going to be vulnerable. The government was going to go after them. What happened, in effect, was the situation of the border, large numbers of people showing up because of conditions all across the region in Central America and beyond seeking asylum at the southern border. The first Trump administration got in many ways distracted

it from its agenda for interior enforcement and instead had to pour a lot of its resources and time into border enforcement. And so some of the harshest, most upsetting things we saw in the first administration had to do with the government's treatment of asylum seekers at the southern border. For example, families getting separated at the border. That was all about trying to punish families who were showing up seeking asylum and basically mistreating them to such a degree the hope was that other people wouldn't even bother to make the trip.

what's happening now is going to be different. In large part, the Democrats now have also ceded a lot of ground on the border itself and on the asylum issue itself. And so as a result, you really already have a situation in which the border has been kind of locked down to a degree that it hasn't been before by Democrats. So Joe Biden has done a lot of the kind of original Trump bidding on, you know, cracking down on asylum seekers who cross between ports of entry, increasing penalties for people who try to cross illegally and so on. Are you saying the border is shut? Well, the border is never shut. That's always been a kind of political fiction. But the numbers of people arriving at the southern border right now

as a result of Biden policies and the policies of the government of Mexico are way down. Now, Stephen Miller mentions criminal gangs, rapists, drug dealers, and monsters that have murdered our citizens and we're going to send them home. What is the level of criminality among undocumented immigrants? Is it any different from the rest of the population? You know, this is something that all through the first Trump administration, we were constantly having to insist on. You know, immigrant populations in general commit crimes at much lower rates than U.S. citizens. There is no evidence that there's mass criminality. There's, you know, there are always going to be one-off examples.

And that's how these guys operate. That's how Miller operates both on the campaign and during these administrations. They find individual instances of ugly violence committed by undocumented immigrants, and they blow that up as though it's emblematic of some sort of trend and it's not. But the kind of knockdown effects of that rhetoric, and obviously the success of it politically has allowed them to do increasingly harsh things to people who are entirely law-abiding. And the public in general sort of throws up its hands and says, all right, well, this is the price we have to pay for getting the house in order. And so the thing that most concerns me in the immediate term, once Trump enters office, there are a lot of people who have arrived relatively recently within the last couple of years who have availed themselves of actual legal pathways that the Biden administration created for them, but which were always provisional and temporary. And this is one of the problems of immigration policy. You know, presidents basically have to act now unilaterally because Congress does not legislate on the issue.

And so that allows someone like Trump to do very harsh things. Presumably you'll have a cooperative Congress this time around. I think so too. And I think there's going to also be less resistance among Democrats who I think now are very convinced that this issue is a loser for them. I'm speaking with staff writer Jonathan Blitzer and we'll continue in just a moment. I'm speaking with Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at the New Yorker

and he's been covering immigration for the magazine since the first Trump administration. Jonathan, is it legal to involve the military and law enforcement agencies at the local level when you're deporting people. And to add to that, we've heard a lot of comparison of what might come and what happened in the 50s with so-called Operation Wetback during the Eisenhower administration. How do they job? Well, that operation, Operation Wetback during the Eisenhower era, is the only precedent, really, for just the sheer scale and volume of deportations that the Trump

administration wants to carry out. At that moment in time, there were over a million people who were deported. And in effect, what that meant, was that a lot of U.S. citizens were deported because they were racially profiled and just rounded up in mass and sent to Mexico. It was an incredibly ugly, dark period, certainly a blot on the Eisenhower administration's record. And, you know, I think now that's certainly the ambition is to kind of recreate that kind of massive scale of deportations. They've used figures like 20 million people. Yeah, I mean, those are fictions. That said, even if they fail in trying to carry out that incredibly ambitious agenda, they can cause immense suffering and damage in the meantime and I think are ready to.

So I think, you know, for example, there was a study several years ago about the effects of a big raid in the early 2000s on a meatpacking plan in Iowa. It was known as the Postville raid. It was a giant raid. Huge numbers of people were arrested until the first Trump administration. that was the highest number of arrests ever made in a workplace enforcement operation. And there was a study that came out a few years later that looked at birth patterns among Latino children in the area, in the state, in that, you know, months and years after that raid. And the study revealed that actually the babies that were born in the ensuing years were smaller

when they were born. the mothers had been so impacted by fear and anxiety about what they had witnessed that it impacted their health and that that was measurable in the birth weight of the children that followed in the in the in the years after that raid i mean the consequences of this are bodily i mean they're psychological of course but they are profound in terms of the social fabric but they're also they're born physically and you mention the fact that the incoming trump administration is going to need the help of the military, the National Guard, and so on. I do think they're going to strain the outer limits of the law on that. What is the law on that? Well, I think the law,

to be frank, we're entering unprecedented territory to some degree. I think what the president-elect is going to do when he's in office is he's going to declare a state of emergency, and that is going to, in the eyes of his lawyers and his legal team, give him carte blanche to involve the military. The president of the United States is going to declare an emergency where immigration is concerned. I think that's how it'll look. You've just reported on people who are in the country on what's called humanitarian parole. So that means they're documented. What has Trump said about that program? Let me first say the Biden administration had a theory of the case at the southern border, and that was it needed to be increasingly harsh in between ports of entry. When people just

showed up crossing the border, as they're legally allowed to do, seeking asylum, the Biden administration response has looked a lot like the Trump administration's response in its first term, which is to say asylum's mostly off the table for people. At the same time, one of the major approaches they developed the Biden team was to use parole, which is a legal authority that presidents have used since the 50s, since incidentally the Eisenhower era, to basically say, okay, in a situation of international emergency or acute humanitarian crisis, we are letting you enter the country. You can live here, work here legally for two years.

We would have to renew that work permit every two years. But once you're here, we can help you regularize your status. The problem over the years has been, there hasn't really been legislation to get people on a path to more permanent status. So in the past, what you'd see decades back was, you know, there'd be a humanitarian crisis in the world. The U.S. would parole, you know, maybe tens of thousands of people into the country. And then Congress would pass legislation that allowed them to adjust their status.

What the Biden administration wasn't allowed to do, wasn't able to do because Congress wasn't acting at all, was it basically was paroling large. numbers of people into the country, over a million people, that series of programs allowed the Biden administration to control the situation at the southern border to make sure that people's arrivals there were more orderly. But the consequence was something that all of us were witnessing over the last couple of years, and that is these people are going to have their status expire, and then what? And so Trump, from the very beginning, on the campaign, now, J.D. Vance has been equally

forceful on this. they've all said they're not only going to revoke these parole programs, but they're going to go immediately after the people who availed themselves for these parole programs. Thomas Holman, who's going to be the so-called Borders Tsar, said, and I'm quoting him here, it's not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It's not going to be building concentration camps. And he also said they'd focus on targeted arrests. So what does that represent? How much daylight is there between Homan and Stephen Miller in their stances? Homan, as you know, was an architect of family separation policy during Trump's first term along with Miller.

A lot of Obama-era officials were surprised by how harsh Homan sounded in Trump's first term. Because Homan had always been a tough law and order guy, immigration and customs enforcement, ICE lifer. But the view, certainly in the second half of the Obama administration, was that Homan is the kind of guy who may not agree with what our approach is. But as a team player, he can get the rank and file on board because people respect him based on his long career in the agency and so on. And so a lot of Obama-era officials called me shocked when Homan started to say some of the really tough-sounding things he said at the start of the first Trump administration. And I also think that that's basically what he always felt. And he sort of was finally given a chance to be unfettered. And, you know, at the start of the first Trump administration, quite literally, Homan was at his retirement party in January 2017.

when he got a call from John Kelly, then Trump's DHS secretary, later, his chief of staff, saying, listen, come back, don't retire. I mean, Homan excused himself from his retirement party at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He's going into the private sector, lucrative job. And he was basically lured back to head ice because it was the kind of career ambition that he had harbored all these years. When he says that they're going to be targeted operations and that, you know, the kind of concentration camps and all of the most nightmarish stuff. things that we've heard aren't going to come to pass. I don't think he's saying that because morally he's got a particular problem with those eventualities. I think it's more of the fact that he is thinking about operations. He is thinking in terms of nuts and bolts of what arrests can look

like. What gives you the idea that he's lacking in any moral fiber? You know, I've spoken to him a number of times and I've just never been convinced that there's a deeper sensibility or thoughtfulness about what it is he does. I talk to people who work in immigration and customs enforcement and they run the gamut. Some people actually are more liberal than you would expect. Some are as harsh and tough-minded as you'd expect. But many of them share a certain kind of recognition, at least, of the human factors at play. And they have different rationalizations for explaining away the fallout of making arrests. Homan never, to me, showed a particularly deep reckoning with what was at stake, either operationally or in terms of actual human beings and how.

all of these operations were affecting them. We talk a lot about guardrails. In other words, the idea is that in the first term, there were institutionalists in key positions at the Pentagon and State Department and that to the great aggravation of the President of the United States to President Trump,

they were guardrails against him going too far. That's one theory of the case. And now the theory of the case is this time around that there are no guardrails. What effect will that have on this? issue. This is the most striking issue to my mind where we've seen what it looks like as the guardrails start to fall away because we already have evidence of it from the first administration. I think actually DHS, Department of Homeland Security was a kind of microcosm of some of what we'll

see in different federal departments in the second term. And that is during Trump's first four years, initially you had people who would kind of bristle at the idea of lawlessness at the department, who would push back against some of Miller's more outrageous ideas or Trump's particular whims. But over time, essentially what you started to see by the end of Trump's first term was people who at least had a kind of fidelity to the department and its agencies fall away, either forced out, you know, resigned out of frustration. And at the time, there was an acting head of the department, the very end named Chad Wolf,

who basically did whatever Miller wanted. And what that looked like in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was to have DHS agents patrolling domestic protest. That's genuinely scary stuff that's beyond the pale of DHS activity. And you were already starting to see that. So I think you're going to see everything be more unfettered. And I think one of the consequences now of having something like the Department of Justice be run by people who have very little regard for the rule of law is you're going to see a more retributive campaign from the Trump administration that links up with the DHS agenda. So one of the things that happened in the first Trump term was the government wasn't able to deport as many people as it wanted because there was resistance from local and state law enforcement in blue locales and democratic strongholds.

You know, cities like New York, Chicago, Denver and so on. Right. And, you know, what the government wants to do when that happens is the government wants to threaten lawsuits and kind of fight this, this battle with those jurisdictions to penalize them to say, okay, you're not going to play ball with immigration enforcement. fine, when you have a, you know, a storm or a natural disaster, we're not going to send emergency aid to you. And for the most part, those kinds of efforts got, you know, slowed down or tied up because of legal fights and so on. I think you're going to have much more concertedness between DHS and DOJ in the second Trump term in prosecuting its agenda and going after jurisdictions that don't play ball. John, you've used the word unfettered. What does that mean in this context and what will that look like?

Let me give a very concrete example. ICE has a policy. It's not a law. It's essentially a regulation that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts. Someone's showing up for a court date, not appropriate to just sweep in and arrest them because you know they're there. That has basically been a kind of rough guideline from one administration to the next. and more or less held. I mean, there were breaches

during the first Trump term. You're going to see stuff like that. You're going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places where in the past you've not seen them before. You know, the aim here being to really create a sense of terror, that is going to be the modus operandi

of the administration. And so, you know, there's a policy involving what's called collateral arrests if there's a targeted operation and the government is going after a set list of people who they know who are undocumented. In the past, there have been basically regulations against arresting anyone you encounter along the way.

That's going to be out the window. And what that means is there's going to be a much freer reign of racial profiling from agents who don't feel like they have any sense of responsibility. So I think what you're going to see is workplace raids, which, you know, we have been spared because the Biden administration has sort of sworn off of them as the Obama administration did at a certain point. You're going to see all of these things come kind of roaring back into the picture. You know, I worry very much about DACA recipients, so, you know, people who came here as children who got a special status during the Obama years and who've moved on and built lives around this status. Trump tried to cancel that policy in his first term and it got tied up in court. That is going to be under assault again. I do think you're going to see an expansion of detention spaces in the United States.

The private prison industry is going to do, you know, very well for, it. shareholders. You know, I think the fact of all this is real. My hesitation in sort of trying to project what it's going to look like is that, you know, we get very obsessed with what the numbers might be. And I think, you know, those numbers are a little bit of a distraction. When Miller talks about deporting a million people, he's pulling that out of thin air. That's not something that he's going to be able to do. But they can cause immense destruction and devastation, even trying to reach that goal. And so it's almost immaterial whether or not they reach a million. If they are able to do what they want to do, they're going to cause a lot of suffering and a lot of

upheaval. Jonathan Blitzer, thank you. Thanks for having. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and you can find his article on humanitarian parole and much more reporting on immigration, all at New Yorker.com. And before I go, I want to tell you about something you're going to want to put in your queue. My colleagues and on the media are starting a three-part series about the controversies

that broke out on college campuses last fall around the. the protests against the war in Gaza and accusations of anti-Semitism, all of which led to the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. The series is called The Harvard Plan. But it's not just a story about one campus. It has implications across the country. That's the new episode of On the Media. Give it a listen.

And I'll see you next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. And we had additional help this week from Jake Loomis. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May,

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