How will these immigration challenges impact our lives?
It seems as though immigration took center stage during the 2024 election, with 76% of Republicans describing it as a top priority for the president to pursue this year.
And since Donald Trump is known to be outspoken, our immigration policy will likely change significantly with the presidential transition. Yet, the exact shapes will depend on the strength of several competing stakes.
Donald Trump faces steep challenges in carrying out the largest deportation operation in our nation’s history, as cost, logistics, and political considerations could get in the way of vacating illegal immigrants all at once.
Trump has remained tight-lipped on details when it comes to how many noncitizens he would deport once he won the Oval Office for a second term, which could prove to be a huge immigration challenge we face.
His campaign only said it would begin with “the nearly 500,000 convicted criminals who Kamala Harris has allowed to remain in the country.”
But, if Trump tries to exceed historical norms, the deportation effort could have wide-ranging consequences that go beyond the staffing limitations of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
He could be met with obstacles and legal challenges from Congress, as he was in his first term in the White House.
Meanwhile, he would be forced to consider a possible drop in economic output and the political fallout from family separations. So, on that note, let’s talk about 5 immigration challenges Donald Trump faces when he returns to the White House!
Immigration challenge: Trump faces limitations over workforce and cost
Mass deportations haven’t generally happened because each illegal immigrant is individually ordered to be deported by a federal immigration judge, not by the ICE officers charged with carrying out the arrest.
Even the deportation of a million illegal immigrants from the interior of the nation in a single year would be tricky for an agency that’s used to removing 100,000 to 400,000 yearly over the past 20 years or so.
The Cato Institute’s director of immigration says that there isn’t a scenario where ICE is capable of carrying out 21 million removals in four years. The detention space, human resources, and air resources simply aren’t there.
Now, using the military, as Donald Trump desires, would significantly increase the capacity. The military assets are limitless if the leadership signs off on their use for this purpose.
And, yes, that’s legal. ICE is broken into Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations. HSI isn’t directly involved in immigration, but ERO officers are the ones who track down, detain, arrest, and remove people.
ERO contracts out its detention facilities, but its approximately 6,000 employees nationwide would be responsible for potentially processing millions of immigrants. ICE also lacks the detention space for an operation of this magnitude.
A second Trump administration could compensate by building up funding, but doing so would mandate cooperation from Congress. To arrest and deport one million people costs US taxpayers approximately $20 billion, according to CBS News.
Now that Republicans have regained more unified control of Washington, Trump will have more flexibility. Trump failed to win billions in border wall funding in his last administration despite forcing the most extended shutdown in government history.
Immigration challenge: Trump not clear on mass deportation scale
At scale, Donald Trump’s campaign pledge could affect as many as 11 million people who are living in the country illegally. He and his vice president, Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio, have claimed at public events that the illegal immigrant population is 21 million.
“About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally,” Vance spoke at a September debate with Democratic vice presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
“I think you start with deportations on those folks.” For a bit more context, no administration has ever tried a pointed deportation “operation,” as his campaign has promised, so Donald Trump’s goal has a low threshold to beat.
To compare, the Obama administration averaged higher yearly removals than the Trump administration, which tallied 1.5 million deportations over a period of four years.
The Biden administration, for its part, pretty much match Trump’s numbers, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
It has done so, in part, by relying more laboriously on “returns,” a sort of deportation in which immigrants agree to leave on their own accord without a formal order.
Immigration challenge: Political backlash to family separations
Family separations, a phrase that gained lots of national attention in 2018 when the Trump administration took kids from their parents at the border to incarcerate and prosecute the adult, could come back as a political migraine if millions of illegal immigrants get deported.
Trump faced severe backlash in his first term for the policy, which immigrant rights groups and Democrats slammed as inhumane. If the deportation was carried out at full scale, approximately 5.5 million US-born children have a parent who’s an illegal immigrant.
Trump told NBC in an interview that he would make “provisions” for mixed-status families or households in which some members are in the country illegally and others not, but that “we have to get the criminals out.”
Immigration challenge: Impending legal troubles
Another possible immigration challenge for Trump would be legal obstacles.
Back in 2019, the Trump administration tried to put in place a policy that would permit the government to hasten deportations for illegal immigrants who couldn’t prove that they had been in the US for at least two years.
Yet, the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, sued in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of smaller immigrant rights groups that said those being targeted weren’t given due process.
Comparable lawsuits can be anticipated if Donald Trump moves forward with these same types of plans.
More recently, Trump’s interest in carrying out the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows a president to deport any person from a country that the United States of America is at war with, has faced suspicion from some legal experts.
Immigration challenge: Economical impact
Employees who are illegal immigrants contribute over $96 billion in state, federal, and local taxes, according to the Center for Migration Studies.
The economic impact of millions of deportations would be “essentially the inverse” of what the Congressional Budget Office discovered from the influx of immigrants into our nation over the past couple of years.
Donald Trump and JD Vance have blamed illegal immigration for repressing the wages of American-born workers.
Whereas immigrant rights groups have claimed that government revenues would be cut around $700 billion and Gross Domestic Product could fall substantially if millions of workers are forced out of the country, with industries like construction, agriculture, and hospitality impacted the most.
In the short term, we’ll see supply chain issues like we saw in 2021. Prices will rise as less is produced, and the economy will shrink, experts say.
“There will be a downshift in US worker employment in industries toward more manual labor jobs and away from language-intensive and managerial jobs.”
MPI, an immigration research group in New York City, stated that even though such a large-scale deportation could deter some migrants from making the journey to the US in the short term, it wouldn’t suppress the desire of countless millions to migrate to the United States.
“Without addressing the underlying drivers of migration, these policies could lead to a change only in individuals’ migration strategies rather than a noticeable reduction of irregular migration overall,” the MPI reported.
What’s YOUR take on these immigration challenges? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below. Meanwhile, if you found this article interesting, we also recommend reading: It’s Simple: Here’s Why Minorities Flocked to Trump
