Trump proposes mass deportations and massive detention centers

Former President of the United States Donald Trump (2017-2021), the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the November election, has made it clear that if he returns to White Househis immigration policy will go beyond the famous border wall that catapulted him to the presidency in 2016.

He has adopted strong anti-immigration rhetoric at his campaign rallies, going so far as to claim that foreigners are “poisoning” the blood of the United States and proposing plans ranging from mass deportations to building giant detention centers for undocumented migrants.

Mass deportations

Trump has repeatedly promised at his campaign events that if he returns to the presidency, he will implement “the biggest deportation operation” in American history.

To do that, the federal government will ask for help from National Guard reservists, he explained. Stephen Millerthe main ideologue of Trump’s xenophobic proposals, just three days ago during Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC, in English), a major event of the American right.

According to Miller, Trump would deploy Armed forces deny entry at the border to those who need to claim asylum and automatically deport those who try to cross into Mexico’s interior.

As an example of this type of deportation, Trump cited the so-called ‘Operation Wetback’who was executed in 1954 by the then president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) and which resulted in the deportation of more than a million people, mostly Mexicans.

According to historian Mae Ngai in her book ‘Impossible Subjects’, the deportations were brutal, with some Mexicans repatriated on what could easily have been an “18th century slave ship”, while others died of heatstroke after the American authorities left them in the desert.

Huge migrant detention centers

To carry out this Armageddon operation, the Trump campaign has hinted at its plans to build large detention centers for migrants and expel them from the United States.

The idea would be to set up “large-scale” facilities where migrants would wait to be deported with regular deportation flights, Stephen Miller, who previously advised Trump during his tenure and may return to the White House, explained at CPAC. conference.

But the legality of these centers could be challenged in court, as has already happened with some of Trump’s most radical plans while in the White House.

In anticipation of those legal challenges, Trump has vowed to invoke a section of the Alien and Sedition Act passed by Congress in 1789 that gives the president greater power to deport and detain non-US citizens in time of war.

This law was used during World War II by the president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) to establish detention centers where thousands of Japanese migrants and their descendants born in the United States were detained.

The Trump campaign did not specify how many migrants would be targeted by this policy. However, it is estimated that currently 11 million undocumented immigrants They live in the United States.

Family separation
Trump also did not rule out the possibility of once again separating the families of migrants arriving at the border, a policy he has already pursued during his time in the White House.

Speaking on CNN last year, Trump acknowledged that the idea of ​​separating families “sounds harsh,” but then added, “When you tell families we’re going to separate them if they come, they don’t come. And we can’t afford for them to have any more “.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in charge of immigration, admitted that they divorced after 4,227 children their families during the Trump administration.

After the coming to power of the American president, Joe Bidenin January 2021, a task force was established to address this issue and, according to a November 2023 DHS report, they have already managed to bring together 3,147 children with his parents.

Biden’s re-election campaign raised the alarm about Trump’s policies and called them out “racist, anti-American and ineffective” their immigration plans.

“It’s simply cheap politics,” Maca Casado, head of the campaign for Latin American media, told EFE.