Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda and How to Resist

By Judy Ancel

I am a founder of The Cross Border Network. Since 1998, we’ve dedicated our work to exposing the harm that US foreign policy has done in Latin America, with a focus on Mexico and Honduras. We discovered early on that US trade policies, like NAFTA and CAFTA, wars, including the drug wars, the policies of deportation, and US interference in those countries, in order to make them safe for corporations to extract resources and cheap labor, are all primary drivers of migration. 

We also learned that people don’t leave home unless “home is the mouth of a shark” [1]. When American companies like Cargill bankrupt Mexican farmers, who can no longer make a living, or buy up their land to produce export crops, and turn campesinos into migrants; or when Hanes hires the daughters of bankrupt farmers to sew underwear for $4 a day and cripples them by the time they’re 30; or when soldiers of the drug war and their local trainees murder families who they wrongly think are trafficking drugs – when these things happen, and they happen routinely, the US and the corrupt politicians they support are the ones responsible for the  caravans of migrants trekking north to our southern border.

Such was the experience of the family I adopted in 2016 – Hondurans involved in a struggle over land donated by a well-off foreigner to be distributed to poor families, which was usurped by a corrupt mayor in their small town. The father of this family was shot in the face in front of his wife and two of his sons by a hired thug from MS-13 (a gang that originated in Los Angeles but was deported to Central America). The victim’s wife identified the shooter, but once he was arrested, orders came from the government in Tegucigalpa to stop the investigation: all believed it would lead to the corrupt mayor. MS 13 came after the family, who fled, spending March to August of 2016 running and hiding across Honduras. They finally mortgaged their house, hired a “coyote” and fled to the Rio Grande, starved and robbed along the way, only to be thrown into a freezing jail and given thin mylar blankets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE officials kept offering them a document to sign and be deported, but much as they wanted to escape the cold, they demanded asylum. After a few days, a friend in Kansas City sent bus fare, and eventually they ended up living with me. They became family. They were the lucky ones. They eventually won asylum.

So when Trump, Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan, or any of the gang of liars who are threatening to deport 11-20 million immigrants (calling them criminals, rapists, or pet eaters), I take it personally, and I believe we must do all we can to resist their plans.

The fact is that the US is simultaneously a nation of immigrants and profoundly ambivalent about immigration. In the 1760s, before we were even a country, Benjamin Franklin reviled German indentured servants coming by the boat-load as a threat to our language and colonial culture. From 1798 to 1965, our immigration laws were racist, limiting or excluding people from Africa, Asia and Latin America and campaigning against people like the Irish who were not from England or Northern Europe. 

It’s no accident that hysteria against immigrants occurs during periods of rapid change and economic distress. It’s much easier to blame foreigners for driving down wages, or changing our mores, than to look upward toward the capitalist parasites profiteering off the people’s misery or at the system that is broken. In such times, it should come as no surprise that both Democrats and Republicans have joined together in keeping out the refugees from our own wars and imperialism, from climate change, and from the dictators supported by the US government. Biden betrayed almost every one of his campaign promises to reform our immigration laws and to provide humane treatment. Both he and Trump deport in massive numbers and lock up (or track) immigrants as if they actually were criminals rather than what they are: refugees from a world in crisis.

Did you know that today the US is the largest jailer of immigrants in the  world? The US has 37,000 jailed immigrants as of last July in ICE jails. Many of those jails are privatized, owned by the GEO Group or CORE Civic, previously known as the Corrections Corporation of America. The federal government spent almost three and a half billion dollars last year to keep them locked up. Immigrant detention is not like the criminal justice system. You have no guarantee of a lawyer: in fact 68% of immigrants in jail have no lawyer. In the private prisons, and in some that are public, denial of health care, adequate nutrition, and help with interpretation are common. At least one private immigration jail routinely sterilized women without consent. 

Right after the November election, the stock value of the private prison companies surged. They are salivating at the profits promised by Trump’s mass deportation plans. The GEO Group CEO has a plan to strap tracking devices on all immigrants who aren’t in jail. That would be 7 million people. Demonizing immigrants costs us a tremendous amount of money that could be used for schools, universal healthcare, and paying for lawyers for these people.

What would happen if Trump attempted to implement his agenda? According to a American Immigration Council report called Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, its Budget and Economy:

With undocumented immigrants now comprising nearly one in every 20 workers, the long-term costs of a mass deportation operation, while difficult to gauge, would undeniably be enormous. American businesses would struggle to fill essential positions and, as a result, curtail the hiring of U.S.-born workers and immigrants authorized to work. Higher prices and inflation would follow, placing financial strain on all Americans…

Widespread “fugitive operations” in which ICE agents burst into homes and businesses across America would become one of the most visible symbols of the federal government. All Americans—especially those living in heavily-immigrant neighborhoods, or whose ethnic background allowed them to be stereotyped as “foreign”—would likely have to prove, repeatedly, that they are not deportable.

Of course that’s not all of it. Project 2025 also has plans to:

• End Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), converting the recipients into deportables;
• Eliminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and deport thousands of Salvadoreans, Hondurans, Haitians and others;
• Reinstate the so-called Muslim ban;
• Reduce the number of refugees to be admitted to less than 15,000 per year;
• Visas of foreign students who are pro-Palestine are to be canceled;
• US embassies to conduct ideological screening of anyone applying for a visa;
• Push for a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship for infants born in the US to undocumented parents;
• Argue that the Supreme Court should overturn the Flores Decision against unsanitary and prolonged detention of children and reconsider family separation.

There is more, but that gives you the gist of Trump’s deportation agenda. Clearly such a policy of mass deportation would destroy lives, separate families, and harm many more people than just those to be deported. 

Many of us are thinking about what we can do to resist this agenda. People are organizing across the country. Here in Kansas City we’re organizing a Rapid Response Deportation Defense Network of citizens who will help monitor ICE, compile information, connect with attorneys, and support families. We will need people to express their outrage at what is happening on social media, letters to the editor, to members of Congress, and in building a movement of resistance.

My organization has its Bienvenido Fund which we will start using for bail and defense work. The Bienvenido Fund also provides aid to immigrants for the rising fees for work permits, DACA renewal, permanent residency, and other costs. 

You can donate here: 

[1] This is from the poem Home by Warsan Shire.