Mexican journalist and TV news anchor Leon Krauze is asking what I think is the right question: What would Donald Trump (and his evil sidekick Stephen Miller) deporting 15 million undocumented immigrants look like?
Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history are no secret — he refers to them frequently in stump speeches. And the outlines of the plan have been amply documented. ...These vulnerable millions know no other country but this one. If they are forced to leave everything they have behind overnight, their anguish will make the hideous stories of family separations we heard during the first Trump term pale in comparison.
I struggle to fully understand some Hispanic voters’ enduring support for Trump today, given his racist rhetoric and terrifying policy proposals. While Latinos are generally more moderate on immigration policy than the average American, a considerable number appear to favor punitive measures. In a recent poll, 53 percent of Hispanic voters said they would support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, with 50 percent supporting “large detention centers” for those awaiting possible deportation.
One possibility is that the sheer scale of Trump’s proposed immigration policies is making it hard for people to comprehend the human toll.
... If carried out, Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned. The impact of mass deportation on families would be profound. In Florida, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person; in California, it’s more than 4 million.
The sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider will be devastating: It is estimated that more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen will fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners in these families are deported. ...
For years I have tried to explain to Anglos that the absurdities of U.S. immigration law mean, at least here in California, that most immigrant families live in what's called "mixed status." Because of history, because the border has at times been close to fictional, because there is often no way to migrate "the right way, the legal way," ordinary people often live "out of status."
If it is not the two parents, it's Auntie Isabel who is undocumented, but looks after the kids while the parents work. For a long time, it was a friend of mine whose immigrant family came "legally"; but they had a lot of kids and somehow they never got around to doing the paper work for him. There are hundreds of variations of immigration anomalies, so as there are millions of long term US residents, our neighbors, who live in legal limbo.
Since 1986 (!) Congress has not been able to pass and a president sign any major reform to our convoluted immigration laws. Republicans have largely decided that inciting hostility to migrants serves their interests. Democrats too have sometimes been hostile to immigration law reform. Presidents have attempted adjustments by way of executive orders, but those create precarious situations for people, as did President Obama's creation of the "Dreamer" category of quasi-legalization.
The most recent effort to enact major immigration reform was attempted by a coalition spearheaded by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma in February 2024. Democratic Senators signaled they'd vote for it, however reluctantly. But Donald Trump preferred to keep immigration alive as a complaint against Dems, so that reform died.
If Trump is elected, he bellows that mass deportations will follow; if we elect Kamala Harris (and a cooperative House and Senate), perhaps there might be a genuine immigration reform law thirty years after the last one. The world has changed; human displacement only increases. It's time to bring a broken system up to date as humanely as we are able.
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