NewsWould Trump’s mass deportation plan actually work?

Would Trump’s mass deportation plan actually work?

In a speech at Madison Square Garden Sunday night, former President Donald Trump reiterated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history” on day one of a second term.

That raises two questions: If he wins the election, could he even do that? And if so, how would it work?

The answer to the first question is a little complicated. While presidents have broad powers over immigration, there are operational, legal, and political challenges associated with his plans that involve invoking an 18th-century legal authority that hasn’t been used since World War II. And though public support for the policy appears to be growing, it’s not clear Americans actually know what they’re asking for.

The answer to the second question is more straightforward: If Trump and his allies can overcome those obstacles, history provides a clear — and devastating — picture of how a federal mass deportation program might go.

The US has previously implemented mass deportation programs targeting Mexicans in the 1950s and during the Great Depression. But never has a deportation initiative targeted so many people, especially those who have lived in the US for years — or even decades — and have family here, than what Trump is proposing. For that reason, Trump’s plans may be even more disruptive than previous mass deportation programs, terrorizing families who have been here for years and tearing apart communities where undocumented immigrants have planted roots.

Here’s what this new iteration of mass deportations might look like, based on what we’ve seen before and what we know about Trump’s plans.

What have previous mass deportations been like?

The most prominent example of a wide-scale deportation program in US history is Operation Wetback, named after the racial slur used to describe immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande to reach the US southern border.

Spearheaded by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, the program used military-style tactics to round up undocumented workers (and, mistakenly, some US citizens) and cram them onto buses, boats, and planes headed for Mexico.

Many of those workers had come to the US under the Bracero Program, a government initiative that allowed them to legally work in the US agricultural sector on a temporary basis. But amid rising American anti-immigrant sentiment and the perception that the Bracero Program was fueling unauthorized immigration, the Eisenhower administration clamped down.

By the government’s estimate, as many as 1.3 million people were deported under Operation Wetback in the span of about a decade.

“They certainly succeeded in returning a lot of people. They certainly succeeded in disrupting labor markets,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former head of the federal immigration agency previously called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose functions were eventually split among the three federal immigration agencies that exist today. “But in the process, lots of people actually were improperly deported who were US citizens or who did have some other right to be in the United States.”

Before Operation Wetback,

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