Last week Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a campaign stop in Austin to pump up his campaign’s central issue—stopping illegal immigration.
"Immediately after taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest mass deportation program in American history," Trump said.
"I will arrest every migrant operating on American soil," he said.
Trump is promising to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to give him the broad and unchecked power to carry out the mass deportations.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship. Although the law was enacted to prevent foreign espionage and sabotage in wartime, it can be — and has been — wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present in the United States. It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.
The Alien Enemies Act was the basis for the concentration camps of Japanese Americans and German Americans during and after World War II.
The American Immigration Council has released a report examining what a Trump mass deportation might look like—based on what he has promised during his campaign.
They considered would happen should the government deport a population of roughly 13 million people who lacked permanent legal status and found there would be devastating costs to America – including for the national budget and the nation’s economy.
The immigration rights research and policy think tank found that the policy would be economically devastating for Texas as well as for the country overall.
They estimate that to deport even one million undocumented immigrants a year would cost over 88 billion dollars annually, for a total of nearly a trillion dollars over more than ten years.
Adriel Orozco is a Senior Policy Counsel at the American Immigration Council.
Past Mass Deportations
When considering the possibility that a re-elected Donald Trump would launch a mass deportation operation, it helps to recognize that similar operations have happened before in the United States, and that includes the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
It happened in the 1950s with President Eisenhower’s so-called "Operation Wetback."
But it also happened in the 1930s under President Hoover’s “mass repatriation.” When the stock market crashed, and the American economy collapsed Hoover was quick to blame the crisis on Mexicans. The Republican launched a program called “American jobs for Real Americans.”
This program included passing local laws forbidding government employment for anyone of Mexican descent, including U.S. citizens. Major companies, including Ford, U.S. Steel and the Southern Pacific Railroad, went along with the government by laying off thousands of Mexican American workers.
This history is documented in the book They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression by Melita M. Garza.
