Trump Is Planning an Even More Inhumane Anti-Immigrant Second Term
For all the horrific immigration policies Donald Trump instituted during his first term—expanding detention centers, separating families at the border, and ending “catch and release”—the GOP front-runner and his allies are sketching out even more disturbing plans should he regain the White House.
Trump has promised to bring back President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which used military tactics to conduct massive roundups of some 1.3 million immigrants, legal or otherwise, across the country, packing them into trucks and shipping them to locations without food or water, resulting in tragic and unnecessary deaths.
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement to The Washington Post, adding that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”
To support such an operation, Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed building mass deportation camps.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Miller, who is largely expected to reenter the West Wing as the leading expert on “America First” immigration policy should Trump win in November, has also described the forthcoming reality of “large-scale raids” and “throughput facilities.”
“I don’t care what the hell happens in this world,” Miller said earlier this month on a podcast with Charlie Kirk. “If President Trump gets reelected, the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”
Behind the scenes, Trump has worked overtime to make immigration a focal point of the upcoming general election. He has strong-armed Republican lawmakers into refusing bipartisan border deals to avoid giving President Joe Biden a win on the issue. He has stoked the flames of a standoff between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the federal government over lengths of concertina wire erected by the state that have prevented federal border agents from doing their job along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border. And so far, his angling has been successful—as of a January poll conducted by Harvard CAPS-Harris, immigration now ranks as the top issue for U.S. voters, with 35 percent of respondents listing it as the primary concern.
“Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state,” Genevieve Nadeau, a former Department of Homeland Security lawyer, said in a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy. “He’s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.”
And the violent measures fly in the face of what Republicans and Democratic leaders alike argue would most benefit their communities: allowing the immigrants to legally work.
“Every migrant I speak to tells me they don’t want any charity; they just want to work,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston wrote in an MSNBC op-ed earlier this month. “When I speak to conservative business leaders, they say the same thing: Newcomers should work; I have open jobs; let me hire them.”
