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Responding to the Threat of Trump’s Dystopian Mass Deportation Plan

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Washington, DC — As America’s Voice has detailed, a Donald Trump second term on immigration would cause incalculable damage to the nation – economically, morally, and the  community and social fabric throughout the country. As we mark the twelfth anniversary of DACA this week, it is important to recognize that Dreamers and others in long-settled and mixed-status families wouldn’t be spared as potential targets for deportation. This mass deportation would separate families as the spouses of U.S. citizens and the parents of citizens would be put in the pipeline to deportation, ripping apart American families, communities, and the economy. And the tidal wave of economic disruption would impact people across the country regardless of immigration status or direct connections to the foreign-born. 

According to Douglas Rivlin, Sr. Director of Communication at America’s Voice:

“Trump and senior Republicans like Senators Graham and Rubio and Speaker Johnson have made the pivot from talking about the border to talking about the mass deportation of tens of millions of immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades. The American public does not think Dreamers or TPS holders or the spouses of U.S. citizens and others with deep roots ought to be priorities for deportation, nor that we should switch the role of police and the military in large measure to carrying out this undesirable goal. But that is the plan candidates and lawmakers have put on the table and the more people hear about it, the more they will recoil. The scale of destruction of moving that many people out of the economy by force is a self-inflicted wound that Americans cannot afford.”

Many more people are starting to respond to and warn Americans about the costs and consequences of Trump’s mass deportation vision, including:

  • Syra Ortiz Blanes and Max Greenwood in the Miami Herald highlight the impact on South Florida through the eyes of long-settled immigrants living in fear: “…the former president’s promises have scared immigrants and their advocates, who fear a new Trump administration would tear apart mixed-status families and disrupt the livelihoods and lives of entire communities … That’s scary for people like Maria Elena Hernández, 65, who came to the United States from Nicaragua in 1996. Hernández has been a recipient of TPS for over two decades. Now, she worries that if Trump wins the presidency, he could move to end TPS for Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries again, like he tried to do in his last round in the White House. ‘We as immigrants are a very important part of this country. We enrich our communities with our culture, traditions and economic contributions. We have raised our families and have started small businesses here.’”
  • Watch a new advertisement from FWD.us that tells the story of a mixed status family who would face separation. Everek Sánchez, a citizen, and his wife, Rosa Elena Sánchez, a DACA recipient and long-time resident of Arizona, are among the millions of American families in the crosshairs of the plan to separate families and deport millions. 
  • Eleanor Clift writing for the Daily Beast, “Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is ‘Big Government’ Gone Mad”: “If such a plan were carried out, it would cause enormous disruption to communities throughout the country and increase the weight of the federal government in people’s lives in a way that runs counter to a political party that supposedly prides itself on small government.”
  • Kristian Ramos column in Salon.com, “The inflationary consequences of Trump’s planned immigration crackdown,”: “Trump’s other big plan to boost the economy, mass deportations of immigrants, would be both a humanitarian and economic disaster … Instead of finding awful ways of keeping immigrants out of the country, we should be reforming our broken immigration system to find ways to allow more people into the country and legalize those here to help raise wages and boost employment for everyone … Yet, despite all of the positive things immigrants bring to this country if elected, Trump would do everything he could to remove immigrants. These mass deportations would be a humanitarian disaster and raise the cost of goods and services for everyone.”
  • A breakdown of economic ramifications of Trump’s deportation plans from Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in The New York Times story, “Trump Vows to Lower Prices. Some of His Policies May Raise Them”: “The deportation of millions of people would reduce demand for the goods and services they currently consume, and could bring down prices for rental housing as their removal frees up supply. But mass deportations would cause a severe supply shock to the labor market, which could increase the overall cost of living, said Mr. Strain, from the American Enterprise Institute. There would be an accelerating shortage of workers for the low-wage jobs that are often performed by undocumented immigrants…”
  • A new column from John Cassidy in The New Yorker, “The Immigration Story Nobody Is Talking About”: “The second important reality is that, in the coming decades, we are going to need many more of these types of workers to keep the U.S. economy growing and to fill essential jobs in industries such as construction, agriculture, food processing, hospitality, and long-term care … But the experience of Japan, where the population has declined in the past decade and a half, and where economic growth has stagnated, demonstrates the challenge that the United States would face if immigration was severely curtailed, as Trump and other Republicans have called for. ‘Our economy needs immigrants to grow over the long term,’ Edelberg said. ‘What we really need to do is open up more pathways for legal immigration.’” 

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