< 12px;">ELECTION 2024

< 12px;">Former President Donald Trump has pledged a nationwide purge and deportation of up to 15 million immigrants, creating a scenario unprecedented in American history. ¶ Trump’s advisers say it would entail creating detention camps and nationwide workplace raids. ¶ Critics fear that American citizens might be need to start carrying proof of citizenship with them at all times. . ¶ Observers anticipate the scale of the operation would compel the involvement of state, local and perhaps military forces, overwhelm already overtaxed courts, create tense international relations as the U.S. attempts to force other nations to accept the deportees, risk rounding up U.S. citizens, expose some refugees to immediate persecution in repressive states, harm businesses and propel the nation to places it’s never been.

< 12px;">Untangling the details of how this all would work is harrowing for immigration experts.

< 12px;">Trump’s plan — pegged by the American Immigration Council at an astounding $315 billion price tag — would inevitably include deporting law-abiding American citizens, and be disastrous for civil rights and the nation’s economy.

< 12px;">Michael Kagan, executive director of UNLV’s Immigration Clinic, says that would be a particular threat to Nevada.

< 12px;">There are nearly 190,000 undocumented immigrants in Nevada, 84% of whom have been in the United States for more than five years, according to Pew Research Center. About 1 in 10 Nevada households include an undocumented immigrant.
Trump has continued to make mass deportation a centerpiece of his campaign against the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, ratcheting up his rhetoric by saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing phrases used in 1930s Germany, and declaring, “We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world.”

< 12px;">Nevada immigration advocates are issuing stern warnings about the “chaos” Trump’s proposal would create across the state.

< 12px;">“I dread it,” Kagan said. “I do not think people are as fearful of it as they should be because almost no one alive today has a memory of what a mass deportation campaign looks like.”

< 12px;">Expediting removal

< 12px;">Kagan figures a second Trump administration would need a “legal fig leaf” for a mass roundup campaign. That might be some-thing called “expedited removal.”

< 12px;">The process generally enables immigration officers to quickly deport people who they believe entered the country over the past 14 days if the person cannot prove they have been in the United States for two years.

< 12px;">However, no judge typically reviews the case. The same immigration officer questioning someone can issue a final ruling if the individual is not carrying documentation showing how long they’ve been in the country.

< 12px;">“That just means that an (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officer ... can stop you and start questioning whether you have documentation to show that you’ve been present in the United States for at least two years,” said Cristian Gonzalez Perez, a fellow in the UNLV Immigration Clinic. “Not that many people have that.”

< 12px;">Trump’s mass deportation language largely focuses on people of Latino descent. It opens the door to racial profiling and forces the people concerned about being profiled to carry identification.

< 12px;">Currently, expedited removal only applies within 100 air miles of the United States’ borders (with Mexico and Canada), which does not include Nevada.

< 12px;">During Trump’s first term, the Department of Homeland Security published a notice expanding the policy to the entire country. However, court battles and the pandemic stifled the federal agency’s ability to institute the policy. Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Homeland Security officially rescinded its use of expedited removal outside of the 100-mile zone.

< 12px;">Trump earlier this month said that Tom Homan, who served his administration as acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be “coming on board” if elected.

< 12px;">Homan is a contributor to Project 2025, ostensibly designed as a roadmap for a second Trump presidency that calls for expansion of expedited removal and a broad swath of immigration-related proposals.

< 12px;">Critics of Project 2025 say it’s an effort to install a white Christian nationalist theocracy in the United States, is marbled with racist policies and brimming with conspiracy theories with violent undertones.

< 12px;">“People need to be deported,” Homan told Time magazine. “No < 12px;" face="Arial">one should be off the table.”

< 12px;" face="Arial">< 12px;" face="Arial">Trump’s mass deportation language largely focuses on people of Latino descent. It opens the door to racial profiling and forces the people concerned about being profiled to carry identification.

< 12px;">Joint police-military operation

< 12px;">The courts system could be swamped, which critics worry could again turn into an excuse for skipping the courts.

< 12px;">During the 2020 fiscal year, 1.3 million immigration court cases were pending, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Now there are 3.7 million.

< 12px;">Hardeep Sull, an immigration lawyer in Las Vegas, said some of her cases are already going for another five or six years. The backlog, she believes, opens the door to ignoring typical processes.

< 12px;">Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, told The New York Times last year that the former president “will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

< 12px;">The former president has suggested he would utilize the National Guard and local police along with current ICE and Border Patrol agents to carry out his mass deportation.

< 12px;">“It’s not going to be Trump himself riding in on a chariot collecting people,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “He’s going to need an infrastructure.”

< 12px;">Trump’s use of the National Guard stuck out to Kagan, who said the branch’s logistical abilities would be useful for transporting migrants and setting up detention camps to house them.

< 12px;">Miller told The New York Times that the administration plans to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” potentially in Texas.

< 12px;">“Those are things that the Department of Homeland Security on its own would struggle to do,” Kagan said, “but with National Guard resources, they might be able to set up a much larger infrastructure that could actually carry out the kind of mass deportation they’re talking about.”

< 12px;">To get a sense of how many people would have to be in these “staging camps” and would require feeding, security, health care and child care for an indeterminate amount of time, consider this: In 2022 and 2023, the entire incarcerated population in the U.S. federal, state prisons and local jails is estimated to average between 1.5 million and 1.8 million, depending on the year. So what Trump and Miller are proposing is creating, staffing, funding and securing detention camps that could approach the size of all current U.S. incarcerations. And that doesn’t include the complicating issue of children in the camps.

< 12px;">Historically, rounding up more than 10 million people hasn’t be done one-by-one. It involves societal scale interventions and could include tactics that expose all citizens to scrutiny, targeting specific neighborhoods or sweeps of job sites where all employees are required to prove their citizenship status.

< 12px;">Local law enforcement, critics argue, is not set up to manage such duties and still keep their communities safe.

< 12px;">When Japanese Americans were detained in camps during World War II, there were full neighborhood sweeps by law enforcement and military.

< 12px;">The Nevada National Guard is under the direction of Gov. Joe Lombardo, a first-term Republican who leaned on a Trump endorsement in his 2022 election victory. His office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on his views on this.

< 12px;">Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, wrote in a statement to the Sun that he would not “dive deeply into legal hypotheticals,” but that his office would always “take a legal stand in defending the constitutional rights of Nevada residents.”

< 12px;">“As Nevadans and Americans, we should always strive to keep families together and avoid the ostracization of any Nevadans,” Ford wrote. “The Silver State protects its own.”

< 12px;">Martin said people in her organization, which includes member groups like the local ACLU and NAACP, were already having conversations about how to make sure Lombardo doesn’t follow through on Trump’s anticipated request for calling out the Nevada National Guard.

< 12px;">A deportation effort would also need the support of Metro Police to launch raids in the valley.

< 12px;">Metro in 2019 — when Trump was in office — ended its federal immigration enforcement 287(g) agreement. The controversial partnership called for holding detainees on misdemeanor charges until immigration agents could arrive and transfer to federal detention for removal from the country.

< 12px;">“We have to be realistic (about) the capacity of what we’re asking people to do. What kind of trauma would we be inflicting when, believe it or not, even families within law enforcement would be broken up,” Sull, the immigration lawyer, said. “It’s the unspoken truth in Nevada. We have mixed-status families so widely.”

< 12px;">Stressing families

< 12px;">Sitting in the conference room of UNLV’s Immigration Clinic, Gonzalez Perez is surrounded by dozens of painted handprints from children the center has helped stay in the United States.

< 12px;">Emigrating from Mexico with his parents in 2003, Gonzalez Perez is a Dreamer, one of the beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents some people who came to the United States at a young age from being deported.

< 12px;">For the past year, Gonzalez Perez has helped the unaccompanied children behind those handprints. But lately, when Gonzalez Perez has been reading over his cases, he’s been looking for ways to help his own family as well.

< 12px;">For anyone in the immigration community, elections are scary because policies might change for the worse. “There’s always that worry,” Gonzalez Perez said. “It used to be every four years, and then it changed to every two years, and now it seems like every single day where now you must start worrying, ‘OK. what’s going to happen depending on the election?’”

< 12px;">Gonzalez Perez remembers his father coming back home early because of workplace immigration raids. Under Trump’s mass deportation plan, he believes those raids would become more common. The stress it would create for undocumented immigrants is “unfathomable,” Gonzalez Perez said.

< 12px;">Martin said the process would be “complete chaos” with citizens being deported along with undocumented immigrants.

< 12px;">“If agents are encountering people in their communities and there isn’t (translation) available, it can very quickly become a situation where people aren’t able to literally communicate with the person detaining them, which can lead to mistakes,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

< 12px;">That situation also raises concerns about racial profiling, Bush-Joseph said.

< 12px;">“This is an attack on not just immigrants but people who you may assume are an immigrant,” Martin said. “I mean, I’m a Black person, and I know people can’t look at me and know where I was born or if I’m a U.S. citizen or not.”

< 12px;">Kagan said Trump’s ability to execute his plan would depend on the courts. Sull and Gonzalez Perez have mixed confidence in the system’s abilities.

< 12px;">“I like to always believe an officer of the court is an officer of the court, even when they get sworn into the judiciary,” Sull said, adding that courts had become increasingly politicized in recent years.

< 12px;">Fast-tracking processes

< 12px;">Project 2025 has specific recommendations to expedite expulsions, calling for significant changes to the Immigration Court system and deportation processes.

< 12px;">Those changes include: expanding expedited removal proceedings to their fullest extent under law; increasing the use of summary deportations and streamlining removal procedures; limiting asylum officers’ parole authority to only “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit;” and restricting immigration judges’ ability to administratively close cases or grant continuances.

< 12px;">< 12px;" face="Arial">It also calls for faster processing of deportation cases with less time for case preparation and limiting access to work permits during immigration proceedings.

< 12px;">To expedite case processing, it calls for reduced time between initial hearings and final decisions, creating performance metrics based on case completion speeds and prioritizing rapid processing of recent border crossers’ cases.

< 12px;">Although Trump did not move on mass deportation in his first term, some of his administration’s immigration policies were halted by courts.

< 12px;">When Trump tried to dismantle the DACA program protecting hundreds of thousands of Dreamers — people like Gonzalez Perez brought to the U.S. at a young age — the Supreme Court in 2020 blocked the plan despite its conservative majority.

Both Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two Trump appointees to the court, voted in favor of ending the program. Trump had not yet appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the court.
 
A federal court in California also blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to kill Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which prevents people from being deported to certain countries with ongoing disasters or conflict.
 
Had Trump succeeded, Florisela Lopez Rivera, 52, would have lost her protected status. She arrived in the United States from El Salvador in 1997, gaining TPS four years later.
 
“And ever since, I’ve been fighting,” Rivera said in Spanish.
 
Rivera, a dishwasher, has worked at Wynn Las Vegas for five years and has been with Culinary Union Local 226 just as long. Wearing a union T-shirt, she spent Oct. 14 canvassing for Harris in Spring Valley’s sprawling neighborhoods.
 
Trump has repeatedly said he would try to strip TPS protections from migrants in Ohio, but Rivera said she tried not to think about his or other Republicans’ plans.
 
“(Harris) comes from immigrant parents who came to this country by emigrating as well,” Rivera said. “For me, it’s a great hope to know that if she stays (in the White House), she’ll understand our condition as immigrants to this country.”
 
Operation Aurora
 
Standing in front of a crowd of loyal supporters Oct. 11 in Colorado, Trump unveiled the first step of his mass deportation plan: “Operation Aurora,” named after a city now at the center of Republican fearmongering on immigration.
 
With mugshots behind him of Venezuelan gang members accused of crimes in Colorado, Trump said he would use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.”
 
The law enables the president to detain foreign citizens of a country the United States is at war with. The declaration of a war against another nation is required by the act. Virtually a lllegal scholars agree on this requirement, and it has been tested in court.
 
However, Trump’s surprising invocation of the act comes directly from detailed Project 2025 proposals of using the act to provide a legal framework for expedited, even random, expulsions.
 
The report admits its recommendations are a novel legal interpretation that flies in the face of settled law.
 
The report describes a strategy to undermine legal precedent by suggesting a Trump administration try to expand the concept of “enemies” to include cartels or transnational criminal gangs.
 
Trump has done precisely that on the campaign trail, where he has constantly told false stories about towns overrun by transnational gangs. What he’s proposing mirrors Project 2025.
 
During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt used the enemies act against German, Italian and Japanese citizens in the country. That was quickly expanded to include Japanese Americans.
 
From 1942 to 1945, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to live in government internment camps. Over 1,600 people died while in detention, according to the University of Southern California, and diseases like smallpox and measles were common. Many lost their houses, businesses and livelihoods.
 
“If you wanted to see what (mass deportation) looks like ... there’s photo documentation of how whole Japanese-American families were rounded up and forced to get onto these trains,” said David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League.
 
Since 2016, Trump has connected his deportation plans to another moment of American history. President Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to deport undocumented Mexican laborers in the 1950s as a part of “Operation Wetback,” which includes a slur for Mexican people crossing the southern border.
 
UCLA professor Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, who authored a comprehensive history of the U.S. Border Patrol, wrote in The Conversation that “deportees were crammed onto buses, trains, planes or boats to be forcibly relocated” to be “abandoned far from both home and the border.”
 
While Eisenhower said the operation succeeded in the exodus of more than a million people, the official numbers are likely inflated. The U.S. depended on fear tactics to get undocumented immigrants to leave on their own and some people were getting deported more than once, according to Vox. The operation also proved deadly for immigrants who were rounded up and dumped across the border.
 
“Operation Wetback failed,” University of Texas professor Victoria DeFrancesco Soto wrote in 2015. “Soon after, migration from Mexico into the United States picked back up. The core demand of Mexican labor was never addressed.”
 
The latter point is often underestimated by advocates of mass deportation: There are meaningful U.S. industries and, especially, agriculture that depend on migrant labor.
 
There is little compelling evidence that U.S. citizens will fill the jobs left vacant by deported immigrants. In an aging America, immigrants have a substantial impact on U.S. economic growth: Over the period from 2024 to 2034, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that immigration would increase the nation’s gross domestic product by about $8.9 trillion.
 
High hurdles in Trump’s way
 
There are a significant amount of obstacles that could stop Trump’s deportation policies.
 
While the next president is inheriting an immigration system that deported over 1 million people under President Joe Biden, Trump’s focus on removing people not near the border would be incredibly expensive, Bush-Joseph said. Logistically, it’s also a tall task.
 
“If you’re talking about (deporting) 1 million people from the interior (a year), nothing like that has ever happened before,” Bush-Joseph said.
 
Trump would also need cooperation from countries where he sends those being deported. And those countries may not let deportation flights land. For instance, Venezuela in February stopped accepting flights of migrants deported from the United States and Mexico.
 
“It still becomes a matter of what is the plane capacity? How many people are countries willing to accept?” Bush-Joseph said. “Because, of course, you can have a country say, ‘Yes, we’ll take people back,’ but then that country might be slow in issuing travel authorizations or they’ll say ‘One plane a week, not five.’”
 
Trump would need to deport 312,500 people a month — that’s nearly the equivalent of the entire population of Henderson — during his four-year term to hit the goal of 15 million. Pew estimated in 2022 that there were only 11 million undocumented residents in the U.S.
 
A little math helps to understand the logistics of what Trump has proposed. Moving the deportees by rail is fundamentally impossible because it would require multiple countries to agree to allow their rails to be used and countries traversed.
 
Most likely, the administration’s deportation effort would require planes.
 
The Boeing 737-800 is the most flown plane in the U.S. and the world. Depending on seating configurations, the plane commercially holds around 175 passengers.
 
If one assumes that Trump removes, say, 11 million people, that would require 62,857 flights.
 
Put another way, that would mean 43 flights per day from the first day of a Trump presidency specifically dedicated to deporting immigrants.
 
And the economic costs of deporting this many people are more than losing the GDP growth the deported contributed to the U.S. economy. Just flying them to another country is costly.
 
While fuel prices vary a little even if the flights were only 2,500 miles round trip (a low estimate), at normal cruising speed for a 737-800, the average flight would cost $15,000 for fuel alone — and that’s the lower end of the best case.
 
With this low-end estimate, the total fuel bill for flying 11 million people on international flights is just under $1 trillion, at $942,857,143. That’s just for fuel — not all of the other expenses associated with rounding up, holding and deporting this many people.
Trump’s estimates of the costs on the campaign trail are a fraction of what the actual costs would be.
 
Trump’s faulty pitch
 
What Trump is proposing has become increasingly popular in the United States.
 
In 2016, 32% of American adults favored deporting “all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally,” according to Gallup Polling. In June, 47% of Americans now favor the policy.
 
His rhetoric has matched the support. On the campaign trail, he said Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the pets of the people who live there” and that immigrants were causing a wave of crime sweeping the country. Neither claim is true.
 
Both Trump and Republican vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. JD Vance have connected immigration to voters’ economic concerns. At an Oct. 9 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump, without evidence, said immigrants were “attacking” union jobs as well as employment for Black and Hispanic people.
 
On Wednesday in Las Vegas, Vance blamed immigrants for the housing crisis.
 
“When you open the border and let 25 million people into your country, you drive up the cost of housing for American citizens,” Vance said, also without evidence. “We’ve got to build more houses and we’ve got to deport the illegal aliens so that American homes go to American citizens.”
 
Martin said Trump’s strategy was trying to win an election by turning neighbor against neighbor and refusing to see people’s whole humanity.
 
Mass deportation would have devastating effects on Nevada’s economy. Immigrants make up around half of the Culinary Union’s 60,000 workers who run the restaurants, casinos and hotels on which the Las Vegas economy depends.
 
“This is the largest economy in the world, and it runs on immigrant workers,” said Ted Pappageorge, the union local’s secretary-treasurer. “Mass deportations, separating families and going after folks that have been here that are contributing to the economy, paying their taxes — it’s just a disaster.”
 
Undocumented immigrants are 8.6% of the state’s workforce, the largest share in the country, according to Pew Research. The group contributes $412 million in state and local taxes on top of $767 million going to the federal government, the American Immigration Council reported.
 
The economic impact of American Latinos increased by over 60% from 2010 to 2022, according to a report from UCLA released last month.
 
The yearly United States Latino GDP study found that, independent of the rest of America’s gross domestic product, U.S. Latino GDP would be the fifth-largest economy in the world — ahead of India and the United Kingdom, among other nations.
 
More than 28% of Nevadans, including nearly a third of Clark County residents, are “Hispanic or Latino,” according to 2020 census data. Of the one-fifth of Nevadans born outside the country, around half immigrated from Mexico, El Salvador or Cuba.
 
Gabriel Sanchez — a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a think tank — wrote in a statement to the Sun that Nevada would be one of the hardest-hit states by mass deportation.
 
“The toll this would take on the economic and overall well-being (of Nevada) is hard to estimate, but it will undoubtedly lead to the need to invest more resources to address them,” Sanchez wrote.
 
Employers have already approached Sull with questions about what to do if Trump gets his way with mass deportation.
 
“I don’t even think the ICE agents would be trained for what he’s proposing,” Sull said. “He is proposing a total evisceration of people’s rights, breaking up families, hurting the American economy — and I say hurt to a point where we will bleed as a country.”
 
kyle.chouinard@gmgvegas.com / 702990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard