President-elect Donald Trump’s stance on immigration in his 2016 campaign could be summarized in three words: “Build the wall.” But in his first term, he did not, in fact, build a wall across the entire southern border and make Mexico pay for it, as promised.
That’s led a lot of people to assume that Trump won’t follow through on his three-word immigration proposal from this election: “Mass deportation now.”
That is a mistake. While Trump began his first term with little more than a bumper-sticker promise for a wall, he will start his second term with a detailed roadmap for how to restrict legal immigration, remove protections from immigrants who are here legally and ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants.
That’s led a lot of people to assume that Trump won’t follow through on ‘Mass deportation now.’ That is a mistake.
He signaled that he intends to do just that when he announced over the weekend that former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan will be his “border czar,” the first administration job pick he announced after his chief of staff. Homan was the architect of Trump’s controversial family separation policy and also one of the authors of Project 2025, a far-right blueprint put together by conservative advocacy groups.
First, let’s be clear on what we’re talking about. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. In an interview with ABC News in August, Vice President-elect JD Vance suggested the Trump administration could “start with 1 million” deportations per year, “and then we can go from there.”
That’s a pretty ambitious starting point and a goal the administration is unlikely to meet. For comparison’s sake, it would be more than three times the average number of removals per year as during the Obama administration, which deported 3 million people over two terms, the most ever in U.S. history.
To do that, the Trump administration is going to need to ask Congress for more funding for the agents conducting raids, not to mention detention facilities and transportation. It’s going to need to persuade local and state police to cooperate with immigration enforcement, something that Democratic-leaning cities and states were often loath to do in his first term. And it’s going to need to convince the 13 countries, including China, India and Russia, that are currently considered “uncooperative or recalcitrant” with deportation efforts, to take back their citizens.
Let’s start with funding. The American Immigration Council, a D.C. think tank that advocates for immigration, estimates that deporting 1 million people a year would cost about $88 billion per year. Trump has said there’s “no price tag” to the deportation efforts, but it remains to be seen how much Republican lawmakers will be willing to foot the bill. Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming couldn’t even bring himself to endorse that number on “Meet the Press” Sunday, fresh off Trump’s election win.
The Trump administration will also have to work to force cities and states to cooperate. The Project 2025 blueprint lays out a number of ways that the Trump administration could withhold federal funding for everything from disaster aid to college financial aid to try to force states to crack down on immigration, but those will likely be met with pushback from blue state governors and attorneys general, which means it will largely depend on public opinion on crime and immigration. If Americans remain concerned about both, elected officials may bend.
And then there’s the “uncooperative” foreign countries. One option for the Trump administration would be diplomacy, which was not exactly its strong suit during his first term. Project 2025 also proposes suspending most or all visas from countries that are “recalcitrant” in accepting deportees, which seems much more Trump’s style but would also create serious headaches. Suspending visas from China, for example, would mean kicking out the more than 250,000 Chinese nationals studying at U.S. colleges.
That’s just deportation, however. Trump has a lot more leeway when it comes to removing protections from immigrants who are here legally and restricting legal immigration in the future.
In fact, the easiest thing to do is nothing at all. By simply refusing to take certain routine actions, the Trump administration could cause hundreds of thousands of people to lose legal protections allowing them to live and work in the United States.
Trump has a lot more leeway when it comes to removing protections from immigrants who are here legally and restricting legal immigration in the future.
For example, current laws require the secretary of homeland security to maintain lists of eligible countries where people can apply for visas to work temporarily in industries like agriculture and construction, and to periodically renew Temporary Protected Status designations for refugees from violent conflicts or natural disasters.
Congress wrote these laws assuming that a responsible president would carefully review these lists from time to time, updating and renewing them when necessary. But Project 2025 proposes exploiting this deference to the executive branch by simply declining to update either list, effectively stripping hundreds of thousands of people from legal authorization to live and work here.
Similarly, the proposal calls for barring staffers from working on programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Uniting for Ukraine, meaning hundreds of thousands of Dreamers and refugees from the Ukraine war would be unable to renew their paperwork.
Ironically, these moves would create more undocumented immigrants overnight. And because these groups of people played by the rules when applying for these programs, the federal government would have their current home addresses and workplaces on file, making it fairly easy to send immigration agents to pick them up for targeted deportation.
The Project 2025 blueprint also lays out a number of minor technical changes that the Trump administration could make to reduce legal immigration. These include raising fees on immigration applications and limiting waivers, narrowing requirements for victims of crime and sex trafficking to apply for special visas, and restricting the wage guidelines for foreign workers seeking jobs in science and research.
Even if Trump fails to take all of these actions, the sheer number of plans mean some are going to succeed, shifting immigration in a more restrictive direction for years to come.
Trump may not have literally built a wall in his first term. But in his second term, he may very well end up building a metaphorical one.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline.