Twelve Million Deportations

And an altered America

As an American, and as a historian who writes about forced population movements, I believe that we are not taking the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. 

This failure of imagination could allow extreme repression within our country as well as a fundamental change in its society and politics.

The Biden administration has deported a very large number of people, more in fact than the previous Trump administration.  But it has concentrated its resources on the border itself.  Most returned people under the Biden administration are recent border crossers.  What Trump and Vance propose is something quite different: to deport all twelve million people who live without documentation in the United States. 

Twelve million is a big number.  And somehow bigger numbers are hard to imagine.  It helps to start with just one person. 

Try to picture just one person unwillingly deported: the altered life, the use of force, the effect on those who participate, those who inform, or those who stand by.  And now try to do it twice: imagine a second person.  And now consider a country with twelve million such scenes.  It is a different America, one in which violence is normal and everywhere, one is which we see it and are dulled to it, one in which we all change for the worse.

When you imagined the scene, did you remember the family?  Forced deportations are directed against families.  About twenty million people in this country are part of a family with mixed documentation status.  That means that if the Trump-Vance plan were to proceed, twenty million families would be broken.  In most of these cases, that means children losing a parent or both parents. 

And now try to imagine someone you know being deported.  If you are Latino, someone you know very likely will be deported, and a family you know will almost certainly be broken.  After all, we are talking about one in twenty-five families in the country as a whole. 

It might be someone who you believed was documented but who is not.  Or it might be someone close to someone you care about: your son's girlfriend, your best friend's father, your kid's buddy's mom.  But it will be someone.  And if you did not vote to stop it you will share the responsibility.

And, of course, it could be you, even if you do have papers, indeed even if you are a citizen.  Trump has said that he will deport Haitians from Springfield, Ohio, even though the people in question are in the United States legally.  The logic of the deportation is a political one, not a legal one.  If your group seems like a useful target, you will be vulnerable. 

What is more, a purge on this scale will have to involve mistakes, especially when run by people who are motivated by enmity.  If the error rate were just one percent, then about 120,000 people will be deported who in fact are documented.  .

An attempt to rapidly deport twelve million people will also change everyone else.  As Trump has said, such an action will have to bring in law enforcement at all levels.  Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe.  And of course the diversion of law enforcement resources to deportation means that crimes will not be investigated or prosecuted.  So some people will be radically less safe, but everyone regardless of status will in fact be less safe.

Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers.  People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples.  Denunciation then becomes a culture.  If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented.  This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader.  You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself.  This painful choice can be avoided not at a later point but only now, by voting against mass deportations.

The attempt to deport twelve million people will likely generate some resistance.  It is hard to imagine that every single person will willingly cooperate.  Some will run, some will hide with friends; and, inevitably, a moment will arise when law enforcement will claim (truly or not) that an undocumented person used force in trying to elude deportation.  This moment is not a side effect: it is part of the plan. 

The deep purpose of a mass deportation is to establish a new sort of politics, a politics of us-and-them, which means (at first) everyone else against the Latinos.  In this new regime, the government just stokes the fears and encourages the denunciations, and we expect little more of it.  If Trump and Vance win, this dynamic will be hard to stop, especially of they have majorities in Congress.  The only way to avoid it is to stop them in November with the vote