Trump said his former ICE director will be ‘border czar’
Donald Trump said Tom Homan will take the position of ‘border czar.’ Homan directed ICE under the previous Trump administration.
When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, my father began carrying a copy of his U.S. passport everywhere he went.
By that point, my dad had been an American citizen for over 25 years. He no longer considered Honduras his home. But he feared that wouldn’t matter in our Georgia town, its manicured lawns lined with “Make America Great Again” signs. If a cop pulled him over for any reason — or no reason at all — his tan skin and last name would be indictment enough.
“This is the only country that I have,” my dad recently told me. “But people assume, because you’re an immigrant, that you somehow don’t belong here.”
My dad’s passport became a preemptive defense against our nation’s growing hostility toward immigrants. His fear wasn’t unfounded.
Certain hallmarks of Trump’s first administration — worksite raids, family separation, gutting the asylum system — offer a bleak preview into his agenda for a second term.
But why worry if my father is a U.S. citizen? Why worry if, as some say, he came here “the right way?” The truth is that Trump’s immigration regime has the power to sweep up far more than undocumented immigrants.
‘Everyone became a target’
Five days after his inauguration in 2017, Trump set out to massively expand the scope of immigration “enforcement priorities.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses these priorities to determine which undocumented immigrants to target. But the Trump administration broadened ICE’s enforcement priorities so greatly that “everyone became a target,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told USA TODAY.
With limited resources, ICE has always been selective about who it targets for enforcement operations. Actual criminals who pose a danger to the public are the priority – not someone merely guilty of a civil immigration violation.
Changing these priorities had an immediate impact on who was arrested during Trump’s first term. More and more people without any criminal history became victims of “so-called collateral arrests,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
“We can expect a return to collateral arrests under the second Trump administration, which happens when ICE goes after a specific target but ends up questioning and detaining everyone in the nearby vicinity.”
Many of ICE’s operations take place in people’s homes. Even if ICE agents go in with a specific target in mind, Reichlin-Melnick said, “They might question that person’s spouse, children, and anyone else there and ask them for their papers. Even if those people have no criminal charges, they have the misfortune of being next to someone that does. So instead of just one person, the whole household gets arrested.”
Collateral arrests rose significantly under Trump. ICE’s data shows that the agency made 110,568 arrests during 2017, a 42% increase from the previous fiscal year.
But that wasn’t because ICE was arresting more hardened criminals. Those arrests included undocumented immigrants who were only charged with a crime, not convicted. The majority of charges and convictions were for non-violent offenses, such as minor traffic violations or drug possession.
Another 10% of individuals arrested by ICE in 2017 had no pending criminal charges or convictions, but were categorized as “immigration violators.” These trends continued in 2018 and 2019, accounting for 13% and 14% of ICE’s total arrests, respectively.
This approach has led to the deportation of American citizens. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that between fiscal years 2015 and 2020, ICE arrested 674, detained 121, and mistakenly deported 70 U.S. citizens.
ICE’s own statistics reveal an irony: by going after everyone, the Trump administration might make America less safe by diverting attention away from actual criminals.
“This is the paradox of enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick noted.
Mass deportations
Trump campaigned on carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history. He said he plans to begin these deportations on day one.
The economic toll would be enormous. The American Immigration Council estimates that deporting one million people per year would cost $88 billion annually. Removing all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States would take over a decade, with a total price tag of $967.9 billion.
The organization also predicts the U.S. GDP would shrink by 4.2% to 6.8%, a larger loss than the Great Recession of the mid-2000s.
Certain key industries like construction and agriculture would also experience massive shockwaves.
Undocumented immigrants make up an estimated 14% of the U.S. construction industry. Pulling that workforce would result in stalled construction across the nation, leaving houses, businesses, and basic infrastructure without vital labor. As industries buckle, U.S.-born workers would likely lose their jobs too.
America simply doesn’t have the population to fill the gaps either. Nearly 90% of undocumented immigrants are of working age, compared to 61.3% of U.S.-born workers. That divide will only grow as more Baby Boomers age out of the workforce.
There would be severe consequences at home too. In Augusta, Georgia, for example, immigrants make up nearly 29% of the agriculture industry. An estimated one out of eight are undocumented. If ICE removes those workers, agriculture in Augusta could be crippled.
Fear is the point
Will the Trump administration be able to create such an immense deportation machine? It would be difficult.
In 2019, at the height of deportations under President Trump, ICE removed around 86,000 people from the interior of the country. That’s less than the 237,000 that former President Barack Obama deported in 2009, the highest number removed in a single year.
“Even if Trump gets back to those Obama numbers, it would, at that rate, take 46 years to deport 11 million people,” Reichlin-Melnick explained. “That’s just the basic math.”
But just because the scale is improbable doesn’t mean the harm is any less real. Each number represents a person – someone ripped away from their home and community.
At the end of the day, whether Trump carries out mass deportations, he’s instilled fear into people’s minds. It’s the reason why my family has discussed moving out of Georgia, where people often equate skin color with immigration status.
I asked my dad, now into his early seventies, what it would take for him to feel more at ease the next four years.
“I just want to live the rest of my life in peace and quiet,” he said. “Somewhere I don’t have to worry about politics.”
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Publish date : 2024-11-30 21:25:00
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