“Mass Deportations Now!” was the message of the signs waved by delegates to the Republican National Convention. The ugly speeches from the stage echoed similar messages.
But, we are starting to see some slight indications that some Republicans are sensing that its horrific mass deportation plans to round up and purge millions of Dreamers, essential workers, and long-settled immigrants might excite their radicalized base – but it comes across as repulsive to everyday Americans. Certainly not enough to make the campaign reverse course – because mass deportation is the campaign’s signature issue – but maybe enough to try to mislead some voters about the extent of its devastating plans.
During a Republican National Convention (RNC) panel hosted by the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 notoriety, you may recall), a top Trump surrogate and likely immigration official in a potential second Trump administration lied and tried to soften the severity of the campaign’s mass deportation agenda. Tried to. Here’s what former Trump acting ICE Director Tom Homan said (emphasis ours):
Last week I made a statement: “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until 2025.” So I said it. I meant it. You can go ahead and print it. People say, Trump’s threatening this historic deportation operations. He’s going to build concentration camps. He’s going to sweep neighborhoods. Let me be clear. None of that will happen.
Homan is referencing the articles reporting his own shocking words threatening millions of families across the U.S. “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he claimed during a July 9 panel at the far-right National Conservatism conference. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Now Homan is trying to backtrack. Which would be great – if he meant it. It’s hard to take the word of a man who spoke at a white nationalist conference, is the “intellectual father” of family separation, and has been one of the leading promoters of the “invasion” conspiracy and then trust him that it won’t be that bad. It was also undercut by Homan himself on the convention stage. On Wednesday night, like other GOP speakers before him, Homan embraced “replacement theory” dog whistles, as well as equated immigration to “national suicide,” whitewashed Trump’s immigration record, and reiterated his mass purging pledge, saying to immigrants, “You better start packing now, because you are going home.”
But maybe Homan is hoping that a skeptical public and media will buy the line Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is selling.
“Let’s see what happens,” Salazar recently told the Tampa Bay Times. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I do know that sometimes, that is rhetoric you say while you’re campaigning (and) that may not happen.” What a telling omission. Setting aside the devastation that will be wrought by the mass deportation scheme in question, Salazar is arguing that her party has no intention of delivering on the signature campaign promise. Don’t worry, vote for me, we don’t plan on keeping our promises is one hell of a political message.
As MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted that this cynical augment might be giving some the permission structure they need:
In other words, these Latino voters are well aware of the fact that Trump says he wants militarized mass deportations and detention camps, but they don’t believe he’ll actually follow through on such a policy.
It’s a position that effectively says, “I’ll vote for the guy because I assume he’s lying.”
Unfortunately, the rest of Salazar’s party is, in fact, quite committed to carrying out a plan of mass roundups, detention camps, and deportation. It’s Stephen Miller who would run the immigration show. As The Washington Post in February noted:
Some ICE officials said the agency could find more available beds in county jails. But Trump surrogates have gone further, suggesting they would put migrants in “camps” or “tents.”
“So you go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids, you have to have somewhere to put them,” Miller said in a November podcast interview with [Turning Point USA’s Charlie] Kirk. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly — probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets — and that’s how you’re able to scale.”
The report notes that Trump himself has pointed to the offensively-named “Operation Wetback” as a mass deportation model. The Eisenhower-era policy was brutal. “In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody,” History.com noted last year.
Lots of these signs on the GOP convention floor tonight pic.twitter.com/u75mOEQwT5
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) July 17, 2024
It’s also hard to doubt their desire to carry out this mass deportation agenda when it is the second point in the party platform topped by a white nationalist conspiracy about repelling new immigrants. Or as attendees gleefully wave disturbing “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs as GOP House leaders and other top elected Republicans put deadly white nationalist conspiracy centerstage.
Contrary to some of the assessments detailed in a recent piece from The New York Times, current standing law isn’t likely to be much of a barrier to the white nationalist mass deportation agenda that’s on offer from the GOP, because the core aim of Project 2025 is to lay out the legal and administrative changes necessary to carry out mass purging. Moreover, the courts have more than signaled in their recent decisions that a Trump administration isn’t likely to find much resistance if it just runs roughshod over the law. Not to mention Trump’s “joking” promise to become a dictator on day one to carry out the nativist agenda.
They have a plan and the only thing stopping them from executing it is an overwhelming result in November.
Taking a look at the data, it isn’t hard to see the tightrope the GOP is trying to walk. While there is some evidence that shows public support for the idea of mass deportation generally, once they understand the details, the bottom falls out. We have outlined the available data on this point before, but new research commissioned by the Immigration Hub provides further evidence in this direction. They found that “mass deportation remains an unpopular solution to handling undocumented immigrants in the United States. Importantly, providing a pathway to citizenship and/or legal status to the undocumented is the far more popular solution.”
Winning broad majorities isn’t what appears to be driving the GOP in this push for mass deportation. Instead, it appears more as a radicalized commitment to an adoption of blood and soil nationalism. No clearer is that nationalist radicalization felt then the center stage adoption of the white nationalist replacement conspiracy theory.
From the House Speaker to other GOP House leaders to senators and candidates, speeches on Tuesday used language that inspired multiple deadly terrorist attacks and advanced lies that actively threaten American democracy.
In his speech, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that we “cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they’ve allowed across our borders to harm our citizens, drain our resources, or disrupt our elections,” which Rolling Stone reported was “nodding to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately trying to flood the nation with immigrants to win elections.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz claimed we are facing “a literal invasion,” which America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas said “sounded disturbingly similar to the white nationalist mass murderer who carried out a targeted attack in his home state just five years ago.”
Fourth-ranking House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik had the gall to claim during her speech to be a champion of combating campus antisemitism when in reality she’s been a leading broker in bringing the antisemitic replacement theory into the mainstream, including running replacement theory ads to more than a million Facebook followers beginning in 2021. When reporting revealed that the racist gunman who targeted Black shoppers in Buffalo in May 2022 had cited this same rhetoric, Stefanik dared to feign outrage.
But the headlines didn’t lie. “Stefanik echoed racist theory allegedly espoused by Buffalo suspect,” read one report from The Washington Post.
The blood and soil nationalism that has captured the soul of the Republican Party was on full display throughout the RNC this week. It manifests most concretely in the mass purging plan and is animated by the replacement theory. It is the mechanism for delivering authoritarian designs, the hammer waiting to strike the death knell of American democracy.
While the harms of a blood and soil nationalism may be too abstract for some, the concrete costs for working families resulting from mass deportation can be made into a sharp attack. Mass deportation is the GOP’s signature issue, and it is unpopular and can be made toxic with the details of its own design.
Trump and Republicans may keep dodging and downplaying questions about their plans to deport millions of Dreamers, farmworkers, and essential workers who keep our nation running, but those around him, and who will be controlling the levers of a MAGA-fied government if he wins in November, keep telling exactly what they’re going to do. We should believe them.
