Tag: immigration

Last week I detoured briefly to discuss a risible plan to pardon Trump because “the voters had spoken,” floated by someone who should know better. We now return to our regularly scheduled nightmare, already in progress.

In part one of this essay, we began a discussion of the brutal paramilitary mass deporations which we can absolutely expect to begin on Inauguration Day, 2025. Now let’s dig into that looming human catastrophe a little deeper.

SCREW YOU, EMMA LAZARUS

Donald Trump has openly announced that he will declare a national emergency on the very day he is inaugurated for a second term, no doubt while Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood are still dueting on a hick hop version of “God Bless the USA.” Almost immediately we can expect raids aimed at mass arrests of migrants ahead of incarceration in privately-run internment camps while awaiting deportation. (Though indefinite detention is more likely.) Trump has also publicly affirmed that he intends to enlist the US military in that task, a longtime obsession of his, as we reported last time—and not just the National Guard but also active duty regulars, if he can swing it. You know, like the real dictators he so admires.

This plan is so chillingly reminiscent of events in a certain central European country in the 1930s that it’s hard to fathom….just as it’s hard to fathom that the American people willingly signed up for it two weeks ago.

Attention all those who swirled their brandy snifters and assured us that “Eh, a second Trump administration won’t be the end of democracy”: Please report to the Department of I-Told-You-So for a Moe Howard-style backhand across the face.

Trump has declared a national emergency around immigration before, in 2019, in order to divert Pentagon funds to build his border wall. (You know, the one Mexico was supposed to pay for?) Only a fraction of that wall ever materialized. But this operation promises to be an order of magnitude more extreme. In his first term, Trump deported about 1.5 million people. (Obama actually deported almost twice that many in his own first term.) He is now aiming for 11 million. The Washington Post reports:

Trump pledged to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million people after his 2016 win but never came close to hitting those targets. At his administration’s high-water mark in 2019, ICE carried out 267,258 deportations and returns, Department of Homeland Security data show. Trump officials likened the approach to “taking the shackles off,” but it generated a backlash that drove more cities and jurisdictions to adopt sanctuary policies limiting their cooperation with ICE.

So what would mass deportation on this newly proposed scale look like? Probably like ICE and other law enforcement units—Border Patrol, Bureau of Prisons officers, local and state police, and anyone else Stephen Miller can shanghai—sweeping into residences and workplaces, unannounced if possible, to arrest pockets of undocumented immigrants, along with infants, small children, and even US citizen family members who get caught up in the dragnet. Developing the intelligence necessary to do that will require a Stasi-like system of neighbors snitching on neighbors, Americans being blackmailed and bribed and strongarmed into serving as informants, and so forth. (ICE has about 7 million such undocumented immigrants in its database, out of a total of 11 million estimated to be in the US.) Electronic surveillance, from the party that performatively hates Big Tech but happily welcomed Elon Musk as co-president, will increase. (Unplug your Alexas, people.)

The raids themselves will be even uglier. The Post again:

ICE officials have long preferred to take people into custody from a secure setting such as a jail to avoid the complex planning and adverse publicity of arrests in homes, workplaces or streets. In 2019, Trump ordered pre-dawn raids targeting 2000 families in 10 cities who had received deportation orders, over concerns from top DHS officials about lack of preparation and the effect on children. The administration also changed immigration enforcement rules to expedite deportations of people who had been in the country for less than two years, making it possible to remove them without a hearing in front of an immigration judge.

Such street-level roundups are so resource-intensive that many ICE officials view them as impractical. The operations require officers to locate migrants and surveil them to determine a safe opportunity to make an arrest. Such arrests often depend on the cooperation of local police.

To arrest and deport families with children, the preparations are even more time-consuming. An operation targeting 20 to 30 families for arrest takes two to three weeks of planning, said (Jason Houser, ICE’s chief of staff under Joe Biden from January 2022 until March 2023). For ICE to reach a target of 300,000 to 500,000 deportations per year—a far more modest goal than Trump’s—Houser said the agency would need two to three times as many deportation officers as ICE has.

Even by the more modest estimate of Tom Homan, Trump’s choice for “border czar,” ICE would have to double its presence in sanctuary cities like New York to carry out something on this scale. And there’s every reason to believe he is skewing the estimate to make it seem less daunting, compared to Houser.

For these xenophobic fanatics, the natural solution to the manpower issue, per above, is to employ the military, despite the terrible optics and the legal obstacles (or perhaps precisely because of them, as part of Trump’s demonstration of raw power). John Bolton reported that Trump “couldn’t care less” about Posse Comitatus, the law forbidding the US military from undertaking domestic operations of this sort. The WaPo again:

In Trump’s first month as president, in 2017, a draft memo obtained by the Associated Press proposed deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to arrest undocumented immigrants throughout the interior of the country. The memo was never implemented, but Trump did sign an executive order directing ICE to detain more unauthorizedimmigrants, including pregnant women and people without criminal records.

If Team Trump couldn’t pull this off in the first try, what makes anyone think it can do it now? Trump’s surrogates are selling wolf tickets like crazy, premised on vague promises of “getting tough,” but they have yet to prove that they can defy the laws of physics. I have no doubt that the raids will be brutal, but that is very different from being effective. What we are likely to see, then, is a fugly combination of incompetence and malevolence, with lots of innocent and vulnerable people chewed up in the process.

NO ROOM AT THE INN

If the Trump administration does succeed in rounding up even a fraction of the undocumented immigrants it aims to, the next question is: where the fuck are they going to put them?

The WaPo reports: “The Biden administration is using about 38,000 beds at immigration jails and other facilities that hold migrants awaiting deportation. During the Trump years, the number exceeded 50,000, but never reached the kinds of capacity levels necessary for the kind of mega-deportation system Trump envisions.” The new administration is therefore looking at putting migrants in county jails, and building new privately-run for-profit facilities outside big cities, including Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington. (Big shock: the private prison industry was a big donor to Trump’s re-election campaign. Two of the largest publicly-traded companies in that field, GEO Group and CoreCivic, have seen their stocks increase 69% and 61% respectively since Trump won back the presidency.)

That plan contemplates only temporary detention, but it’s easy to envision it stretching into months or even years. Mass deportation is not a unilateral move that the US can undertake on its own: foreign countries are not obliged to take the millions of immigrants Trump & Co want to kick out, and many won’t, despite Donald’s bullying and blackmail. The obvious outcome is a semi-permanent gulag archipelago of apprehended immigrant families—men, women, and children—held without due process or any resolution on the visible horizon.

It is here that we encounter one significant difference between the anti-immigration programs of the first and second Trump administrations, besides scale and ambition.

Because the family separation policy was so horrific and inhumane, and because it caused enough revulsion that even Trump had to reverse himself—the only major policy retreat that the infantile bastard undertook in his first term—Trump’s team has not signalled that it will reinsitute it. (Though as the Post reports, when asked in 2023 whether he might do so, “Trump declined to rule it out and defended the policy.”) Border czar-to-be Homan was head of ICE during that first administration and led that policy, which was also known as “zero tolerance,” the administration’s preferred term. Asked by 60 Minutes last month if it there’s a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, he replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

That quote packs a litany of horrors. For one, it suggests arresting and imprisoning whole families, a policy known as “family detention,” which was Trump administration policy from late June 2018 until the end of this term. (Biden ended that policy soon after taking office, and while he briefly considered reinstating it in March 2023 as the border crisis surged, public outcry prompted him to abandon the idea.) Cruelty is one aspect of that; the daunting practical challenges are another. The former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser told the WaPo: “You’re talking about building a major logistics apparatus that would still have to meet court and legal requirements for health care and child care,” he said.

I’m not sure Stephen Miller will bother with that.

It also means that the US-born children of undocumented immigrants—who are US citizens under the 14^th Amendment, and are prevalent in these families—would be arrested and incarcerated as part of these new sweeps. That’s of a piece with the Trump/Miller wet dream of ending birthright citizenship altogether, by fiat, and challenging to courts to stop them.

How long would these poor people languish in these camps before Miller proposes—with no discrenible irony—that it’s costing the taxpayers money, and isn’t there a better solution…..you know, like, a final one?

Hyperbole you say? OK: let’s talk in six months.

In a separate interview with Fox, Hannity offered Homan a lifeline (as he often does with his right wing interviewees), proposing a marginally more humane and politically appealing alternative: why not incentivize “illegal immigrants” (again, in the right wing’s preferred language) to self-deport in exchange for a small cash payment, with a pathway to legal return later? Homan replied coldly: “The ones that want to go home on their own—they found their way across the world to come to the greatest nation on earth. They can find their way home.”

And won’t the Department of Government Efficiency Department be pleased.

CRUEL TO BE CRUEL

The sadism and brutality of the deportation plan are reason enough to oppose it, but it‘s also pragmatically, logistically, and economically absurd. On the crassest possible level, simply consider the pricetag.

According to Heather Cox Richardson, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the mass deportation plan will cost at least $88 billion a year, but the direct costs are the least of it when one considers its broader effect on the economy. I invite your attention to the 2004 film A Day Without a Mexican, which imagines what would happen to the American workforce if every single Mexican worker magically vanished, Rapture-style. I’ll save you two hours: it would collapse. Hatred of immigrants is often predicated on the idea that they’re taking jobs from Americans, but the US has close to full employment for its citizens, which is at its highest level since 2001. Rather, what undocumented workers do is the grueling, low-paying work that Americans won’t. They pick our vegetables, process our meat, deliver our goods in the pouring rain, ring up our purchases, and every other grindingly menial job you can think of. Bonus damage: Bloomberg reports that undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Not that we want Trump to succeed with this grotesque plan, but if does, how is that shortfall gonna be made up? It’s not like a hurricane; you can’t just pull out a Sharpie and make the balance sheet balance.

Here we see the mask drop and the real motive behind “mass deportations,” beyond just being a grotesque re-election strategy that panders to the worst instincts in the self-described “greatest nation on earth.” For along with the deportations and an end to birthright citizenship, Trump, Miller, Homan et al also want to institute severe new limits even on legal immigration, giving the lie to the Republican claim that they’re not xenophobes, just devotees of law and order. (In 2019 Trump also tried to end DACA—which offers a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children—but was blocked by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling. He would now have a 6-3 supermajority ready to rule in his favor.)

Because these guys don’t just hate “illegals.” They hate all immgrants, legal or not.

Back to The Washington Post:

As the number of people in ICE custody jumped 22 percent in Trump’s first two years, the DHSinspector general uncovered “egregious violations of detention standards,” including inadequate medical care, expired food, lack of recreation, moldy bathrooms and inadequate clothing and hygiene supplies. A separate inspector general’s investigation found “dangerous overcrowding” in an El Paso facility, where a cell built for 25 people held 155.

In June 2018, reporters and human rights activists toured a facility in McAllen, Tex., where children slept under foil sheets surrounded by chain-link fencing, after DHS acknowledged separating children from their parents at the border. Public outrage over an audio clip of a sobbing child forced Trump to halt the practice. DHS later identified 4227separated children, 3147 of whom were reunited with their parent as ofNovember 2023.

But for Trump & Co., none of that matters….or perhaps it’s more precise to say that it matters a lot—and they like it. As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown writes, “that all supposes that there’s any interest from the administration in being efficient or precise in the process of forcibly removing millions from their homes.” In reality, that opposite is true.

Under the family separation policy, the Trump administration deliberately did not keep accurate records—or any records, in some cases. As a result, DHS estimates that some 1360 children have still not been reunited with their families. Even those that have been reunited are almost certainly suffering from trauma, perhaps irreparably, and their family members as well. Brown again:

We could call it incompetent if the goal had been to provide humane shelter for migrants being detained or speed their processing through the immigration system. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to make other migrants too afraid to cross the border.

That deterrent never materialized, but that, too, was fine with Trump and his supporters, because it was also a lie, covering their real goal, which was to inflict pain for its own sake, in keeping with their guiding principle that “the cruelty is the point.”

Trump, predictably, is generally keen on sadism and violence against immigrants. In his first term “he privately mused….whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.”

Indeed, from the very first announcement of his presidential run in 2015, Trump has made the demonization of immigrants the centerpiece of his political career, building off the racism that was the bedrock of his public persona going back to the Central Park—now Exonerated—Five, not to mention being the primary public proponent of birtherism, and the subject (along with his father) of a racial discrimination suit by the federal government as far back as 1973. And we can leave aside for now the history of racism in the Trump family and even associations with the Klan.

But his hysterical demonization of immigrants reached a zenith (or was it a nadir?) during the recent presidential race. Speaking to the right wing website the National Pulse, Trump floated the lie that foreign countries were emptying their insane asylums to and sending the patients into the US along our southern border. He trafficked in literal Nazi verbiage in saying migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and at a rally in Florida compared them to the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter, saying, ‘That’s what’s coming into our country right now’.”

(Reports that Elon Musk once worked illegally in the US, and Melania’s questionable Einstein visa, not to mention a history of sketchy immigration by Trump’s ancestors, add to the irony without having any practical mitigating effect.)

In a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy, Genevieve Nadeau, a former DHS lawyer, said that “Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state. He’s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.”

WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE

The belief that Trump won’t go through with an attempt at mass deportations hinges on magical thinking.

The pundits say he will have learned from his first term, and it’s clear that he has. The behavior of the Trump and his (ahem) transition team speaks volumes on that front: not bothering to seek security clearances for staff; not coordinating with the GSA in the normal transition process; not signing memoranda of understanding or agreeing to an acceptable code of ethics; not including State Department personnel or official government interpreters when speaking to foreign heads of state—including Don’s good buddy Vlad Putin—and doing it on non-secure lines to boot. Reportledly not a single Trump official has even set foot inside a federal office during the transition; it’s all being done from Mar-a-Lago.

A Trump ally told The Washington Post described what is going on as less a transition than “a hostile takeover,” and that sounds about right.

The guy who said that was Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, which he describes as a “bare knuckles” legal lobby dedicated to defending Trump. Davis is a former clerk for Neil Gorsuch and Federalist Society type turned rabid MAGA troll who himself was in the running to be  Trump’s Attorney General (at least in his telling). Adam Wren of Politco reports that Davis has promised “to eviscerate institutions that he says treat Trump unfairly,” to send journalists and Republican apostates like George Conway and Tim Miller to “the gulag,” and to put migrant kids in “cages.” (That one has actually been done before.) “My goal,” he told Wren, “is for the Supreme Court to dismantle most of the federal government.”

Last September, Davis made headlines for an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show in which he outlined a dystopian agenda for what he would do during a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s “acting attorney general before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon.” His list included firing “deep state” employees, indicting Joe Biden, deporting millions of immigrants and putting “kids in cages,” detaining people in the “DC gulag” and pardoning Jan. 6 defendants,  “especially my hero, horn man.”

These are the people who Trump is bringing with him when we rolls back into Washington.

Davis claims he was just joking about the gulags and such, to own the libs, blah blah blah. You know, the way Trump “jokes” about a third term. Or having Liz Cheney shot. Or “terminating” the Constitution.

EMILY DICKINSON ON CAPITOL HILL

Is America ready for something on the order of these mass deportations? Will the American people stand for it? Will the Republican Party, on which Trump ultimately depends? I know that last question invites ridicule, given how cravenly submissive the party has been to him over the past eight years. And is there any reason to think it even wants to stand up to him? The GOP has long been the party of xenophobia, even before Donald Trump, and it gladly followed his demagogic playbook to a trifecta in the last election. But what is about to happen should—rightly—be beyond the pale even for Republicans.

So is there any cause for optimism? Well, a little.

We saw Rand Paul tell Newsmax he would “not support an emergency to put the Army into our cities,” which he called “a huge mistake.”

I think it’s a terrible image to send the world. It’s a terrible image for us as citizens. And so I hope (Trump) will think twice about trying to use an emergency edict to have the Army patrolling our country. There is, to my mind, some question of the people—the housekeeper who’s been here 30 years, I don’t see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment. I don’t really want to see that.

And there are a couple other promising signs—not enough that I’m ready to put a deposit down for a celebratory party in the back room at Houlihan’s, but glimmers nonetheless. Mitch McConnell has put the kibosh on the idea of recess appointments for Trump’s ghoulish slate of Cabinet nominees, and new Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced that he won’t push to get rid of the filibuster. That may be sheer institutionalism, or long range concern for the day when Republicans will be in the minority again (a boy can dream), or maybe even some weird behind-the-back pass to help Democrats block Trump’s worst excesses. (A boy can really dream.) We’ll see if it sticks, but for now, it’s mildly cheering.

Jesus, what’s the world come to when I’m praising Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and John Thune? I told you the apocalypse was upon us.

But the big news last week and most hopeful sign was that Matt Gaetz got his ass handed to him. Frankly I was surprised, but apparently the House Ethics Committee had the goods on him, and those goods were devastating. (John Mulaney will tell you that Venmo exists only for drug dealers, but evidently sexual predators like it too.)

Gaetz’s fast and unceremonious downfall was a rare glimpse of Republican courage, as elusive as a snapshot of Bigfoot playing hacky sack with DB Cooper and the Loch Ness monster on a UFO. A win is a win, and I’ll take it, but that’s how low we’ve sunk: a Congressman with extremist views and a record of pursuing them, widely loathed by both sides, and a history of sex trafficking and predation (including at least one minor), who’s never been a prosector or a judge and in fact has no experience in the criminal justice system except as a defendant, fails to get confirmed as Attorney General and we’re surprised. It’s a low bar yes….but I didn’t think there was a bar at all.

So is it possible that Trump 2.0 won’t be quite the fascist free-for-all I fear? Hope springs eternal. But it’s also the thing with feathers, if those feathers are on a mythical dinosaur-like bird/lizard that’s going to devour us all.

When John Roberts swears Trump back into office on January 20^th and the paddywagons full of ICE officers in riot gear roll into your town, we will find out.

********

Photo: Migrants being held in a makeshift detention center, El Paso, TX, March 2019. Credit: Sergio Flores / The Washington Post.

Less than two weeks into the post-election interregnum and we already know a lot about what lies ahead.

Trump rolled out his Cabinet picks with uncharacteristic speed­—a bad sign that his team has a plan, ready to go—and it was a slate that shocked even inveterate Trump watchers accustomed to the absolute worst from this guy. Gabbard, Gaetz, and RFK Jr are in a dead heat for worst choice, with the others in a twelve-way tie for third. A Russian stooge (at best) to control US intelligence, a troll under criminal investigation for sex crimes by the department he’s been tapped to lead, and a cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist with a worm in his brain and a penchant for decapitating whales and hoarding dead bearcubs in charge of public health. What could go wrong?

It’s a group so grotesque that it beggars parody; even Trump’s worst critics did not dare imagine picks this ass-wipingly bad. But this is what you asked for, folks. Did you really think the candidate who mimed a blowjob, portayed his Black female opponent as a low-IQ prostitute, and held a neo-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden was gonna pick sober, qualified veteran public servants?

Truly this is the kakistocracy. That is not new in Trumpworld, but this bunch makes Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt look like Roman statesmen. Funny how the same people who thought Kamala Harris—former DA of San Francisco, AG of California, US Senator, and Vice President of the United States—was somehow “unqualified” are fine with this crew.

And as a buddy of mine—a longtime federal employee—quipped, what does it say that they have two people heading the Department of Government Efficiency?

In several cases the nominees appear deliberately selected to destroy the departments they will head. (“Trump nominates Godzilla for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development” as the Instagram pundit Middle Age Riot posted.) Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, argues that these choices are exactly that:

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so?  The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. 

These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

Why Trump wants to help our enemies do that I don’t know. Perhaps a special counsel could look into it.

Gaetz was a shock; I really thought it would be Aileen Cannon for AG, but maybe Donald’s saving her for Clarence Thomas’s seat when he strategically retires and hits the road full time in his RV. Though Gaetz is inarguably the most stomach-turning, for me, as someone with a history in the intelligence community, Gabbard is particularly outrageous, an absolute cartwheel-inspiring strategic victory for Vladimir Putin (much like her boss who appointed her). If this were a movie, the audience would throw popcorn at the screen at the implausibilty of it all. I have to believe that career IC officers—whose stock in trade, after all, is subterfuge—will withhold intel from her…..or better yet, jiu-jitsu the situation by feeding her disinformation that will drift back to Moscow. It’s not called a wilderness of mirrors for nothing. But I look forward to the CIA’s new motto: “Why don’t you play a little solitaire?”

And don’t let’s even start on Bobby K. This week on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry freaks out when Cheryl’s new husband gets a Cabinet appointment. (And Leon becomes ambassador to the Vatican because his name is an anagram for Elon.)

And Pete Hegseth? Cracker, please. How does this guy join the august tradition of Forrestal, Marshall, McNamara, Schlesinger, Rumsfeld, Richardson, Gates, Cohen, Paneta, Mattis, and Austin? Yes, there are a couple real monsters too (looking at you, Rummy), but even those monsters were at least proper, formidable villains. By contrast, Hegseth, like Trump, is a wildy unqualified clown with a disgusting personal history and poisonous policy views, but also like Trump, an incredibly dangerous one. So we’re giving a white nationalist National Guard major turned Fox News host access to the nuclear codes? As the kids say, that tracks. (I feel bad for those folks who have to shake his hand.) Yes, the four-star service chiefs will treat him like an insect, while staying just shy of open insubordination, but in the end, the chain of command is the chain of command. Just ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, US Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., whom Pete will likely fire just because he’s Black.

It now emerges that Hegseth may be sunk by an allegation of sexual assault—not that that hurt Trump, whom a judge declared had committed rape, or a pattern of credible allegations of that sort against Gaetz. We shall see. Much as I’d love to see him kept out of the Cabinet, the idea that an accusation of sexual assault would do it, and not his sheer lack of qualifications or Wannsee Conference-ready political views, says it all.

At this point, I’m almost more shocked by who’s been snubbed, so far. Giuliani for Secretary of Hair Dye, Cousin-Marrying, and Four Seasons Landscaping? Mike Lindell for head of the Bureau of Pillows, Crucifixes, and Crack? Grenell as US Ambassador to Mordor? How about Sidney Powell? Johnny McEntee? And where is Mad Mike Flynn anyway? Eating Turkish food with Eric Adams somewhere, I presume.

Talk that this rogues’ gallery of Cabinet picks will face trouble getting confirmed is absurd. Does anyone seriously think the supplicant Republican-controlled Senate is going to stand in the way? Donald will get all of them through, via one form of GOP cowardice or another: the Senate will either confirm them without so much as a polite clearing of the throat, or bow to his desire for unconstitutional recess appointments. The only reason Trump would press for the latter is to avoid giving the Democrats a platform for theater. But he may not care.

Clearly, Trump is challenging and testing the GOP leadership (“leadership”) right out of the gate. These are schoolyard bully tactics, which are his stock-in-trade. If any senior Republicans dare push back—and I doubt any will—they will be purged. The rest will have been preemptively emasculated, a humiliation they will meekly accept, setting the tone for all that is to come.

And what is to come promises to be very bad indeed.

MILLER’S CROSSING

I say all this about the Cabinet picks not to dunk just for the sake of dunking, or to comfort myself with a snotty sense of superiority as we careen toward armageddon, but because it’s a grim augury of what’s next.

Two weeks ago I described the presidential election as a test, one that America failed. Another big test is bearing down on us—a pop quiz on the first day of class, and we’re like a bunch of first semester freshmen who didn’t do the reading because we were shotgunning Natty Bo and doing bong hits all night.

Make no mistake: the new Trump administration will immediately launch mass deportations—or an attempt at them—on day one, perhaps even as soon as John Roberts smiles and Trump removes his hand from the Bible, which miraculously has not burst into flame (but it wanted to). Stephen Miller is rock hard just thinking about it.

Remember the so-called Muslim ban? That was Weekend #1 of his first administration. They wanted to make a statement fast and hard and they did, even if it was a disaster that Trump had to back away from, really the only reversal of policy the famously non-apologetic bastard made in his whole first term. They will surely try a similar shock-and-awe maneuver right out of the gate this time, and I don’t believe that the American people are remotely ready for it.

The incoming administration had made it clear that it thinks it has a mandate from the American people to carry out the vile, neo-fascist agenda it promoted on the campaign trail. It would have acted that way even if Kamala had won the popular vote, but the current circumstances, and with the GOP recapturing the Senate and holding onto the House, make it even easier. And sadly, their presumptuousness is not unjustified. After all, Trump didn’t hide what he planned to do: on the contrary, he shouted it from the rooftops. And the American people signed on.

But setting aside the small niche of rabid xenophobes, Trump’s victory at the polls suggests that, broadly speaking, the American people may not have been paying very close attention to what he promised to do in a second term, or at the very least didn’t fully understand it. As Christian Paz writes in Vox, “Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on….substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail.”

Americans might not understand that deportations of all undocumented immigrants would include deportations of DACA recipients and longtime neighbors or friends who have been living normally and are bedrocks of local communities, advocates and researchers say—rather than only recent arrivals, or those few migrants who commit violent crimes.

According to the Pew Research Center, “as many as 40 percent of registered voters who support mass deportations also support a policy that would allow undocumented spouses of US citizens to remain in the country.” That doesn’t square with the draconian ICE raids and mass incarceration of whole families—including children and legal residents of the US—that the Trump campaign has vowed.

And what unholy trinity will oversee this pogrom? Naturally it will be led by famed xenophobic homunculus Stephen Miller, Trump’s cartoonishly evil immigration adviser; former South Dakota governor and dog-killing enthusiast Kristi Noem, who is his nominee to be Secretary of Homeland Security; and border czar Tom Homan, straight from Central Casting, where he could have had a fine career playing redneck sheriffs and sadistic prison wardens.

Experts, current and former government officials, and others interviewed by The Washington Post described Trump’s plans as “alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles.”

“You’re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?” said Jason Houser, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of stafffrom January 2022 until March 2023. “Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That’s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.”

Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, “Their ideas were psychotic.”

FAST, CREEPS, AND OUT OF CONTROL

Per Houser, some argue that mass deportation on the scale Trump promises is wildly unfeasible, even for a well-oiled administration, which this one ain’t gonna be by any stretch. It’s by no means clear that Trump will have the organization or infrastructure to execute his plans, not to mention senior personnel who won’t tear each other apart with Borgia-like zest. No one even knows how mass deportation would work. (Perhaps the ghost of Adolf Eichmann can be consulted via oujia board.)

But they will certainly try. And while it’s true that the Trump Administration 2.0 will surely be a dumpster fire of dysfunction, immigration policy may be the area where it is most effective. As Hayes Brown writes for MSNBC:

Even as the rest of the administration may bumble about and clash with one another, that might not be the case when it comes to enforcing Trump’s dark immigration plan. Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be distressingly effective at working together. The only limit they will likely face is how much the public will allow to be carried out in its name.

But the effectiveness of this scheme is almost beside the point. The plan does not have to work well, or work at all, to inflict the harm and suffering that is its actual goal. “The cruelty is the point” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer said about the family separation policy of the first Trump administration, and this will make that look like tea at the Plaza. (On that topic, I strongly recommend Separated, Errol Morris’s powerful new documentary on that subject, based on the book by Jacob Soboroff.)

Are we ready? Will the American people, who voted this rancid meatsack back into office, be shocked by what he does? Will they shrug? Applaud? I dunno. A mix, of course. But the Cabinet picks are a sure sign that the mass deporation plan is very real, and will hit with maximum force and no half measures.

Truthout reports that “with Trump’s return, we can expect not only mass raids of homes, worksites and communities, but the stripping of status from millions of people. With the scale of what has been proposed, some 28 million people could be at risk of family separation in 2025.”

Here’s how the The New York Times frames it:

The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped US forces would be re-vetted to see if they really did.

And they will come first for a place like New York City first: the biggest city in the country, the most liberal (sorry, Berkeley), Trump’s hometown, and one packed both with migrants and diversity in general. Eric Adams—scrambling to avoid criminal convictions himself, and about to face a judge who was once a lawyer for the ACLU fighting the family separation policy—may well play along, with the unspoken quid pro quo of a presidential pardon dangling before him. Will the NYPD do likewise? Will the New York State National Guard? If Kathy Hochul balks, will Trump federalize them? Will their chain of command go along, or do their duty and refuse to obey illegal orders, should they be issued?

And it won’t stop with “illegals” either. Miller want severe limits even on legal immigration, including an end to the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and even to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. (Paging Martin Niemöller.) The WaPo reports that to do so, Trump “would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.” Such moves would surely wind up in front of the Supreme Court, the same Supreme Court that recently ruled that a US President can pretty much do whatever he wants.* (And I do mean “he.”) I think we all know how that will go.

(*Fine print: Applies only to Republicans.)

Carrying out this plan will require resources far beyond those currently available to ICE, which presents worrying prospects of its own. The Washington Post reports that ICE only has about 6000 deportation officers nationwide, and that it takes about two years to recruit, screen, and train a new deportation. To provide reinforcements, Miller is a fan of enlisting state police, National Guardsmen, and other federal agencies (presumably FBI, ATF, Secret Service, and the Bureau of Prisons, whose officers—in sterile, unmarked uniforms, a la Putin’s “little green men” in Crimea—figured heavily in suppressing the George Floyd protests in 2020). Speaking to the right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in November 2023, Miller even proposed “sending National Guard troops from Republican-led states into neighboring states governed by Democrats. ‘If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, they would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland.’”

That sounds normal.

Trump himself has long been keen on involving the US military in his anti-immigration plans, almost to the point of fetish, including not just National Guard but active duty forces, befitting his view of himself as a despot. “He was obsessed with having the military involved,” a former senior official in the Trump administration told the WaPo, speaking on condition of anonymity. John Bolton reported that Trump “couldn’t care less” about Posse Comitatus, the law forbidding the US military from undertaking domestic operations; no doubt he will find some Reichstag fire-style reason to get around it, which makes allowances for national emergenices. A salivating Stephen Miller has already proposed invoking the Insurrection Act. (Very ironic, of course, for the party of insurrection.)

It hardly bears mentioning the hypocrisy of this xenophobia and cruelty from a nation that ostentatiously prides itself on being built by immgrants (even as it exists on stolen land), and holds up the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s poem as part of national iconography.

I think Emma may have gotten wrong exactly who the “wretched refuse” are.

LOOKING DOWN THE BARREL

So what’s next? I don’t dare guess. I know the Onion bought InfoWars, but when Matt Gaetz is AG and Tulsi Gabbard is DNI and RFK Jr. is in charge of public health, satire is dead.

There are reports of Trump voters already having buyers’ remorse as they learn what a tarrif really is, and there will be loads more once the deportations begin, sweeping up folks who never thought for a moment that Trump meant them. The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is going to have a field day.

What does it say when prominent Trump critics and opponents, including high-ranking members of the previous administration, are worried about being jailed, court-martialed, or even executed, or short of that, the subject of freelance violence by Trump supporters acting on their own, but egged on and inspired by their Dear Leader? That is the sort of thing that was unimaginable in America, even in our worst moments. And yet here we are.

An overreaction you say? Hysteria? Trump Derangement Syndrome? I hope that proves true, and I’ll take it gladly. But if past is prologue, there is no reason to think that the worst is not very possible when it comes to what Donald Trump will do.

Trump has said he’ll be a “dictator for one day,” and I don’t suspect that day will be in the middle of his term. In fact, he‘s already talking about a third term. (­That was fast, no?) Just a joke, his GOP defenders say! Sheesh, you libtards have no sense of humor! “That was a joke. It was clearly a joke,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) when asked about it. “I leaned over to somebody beside me, Andy Biggs, and I said, that’ll be the headlines tomorrow, ‘Trump trying to thwart the Constitution,’ which—there’s nothing further from the truth.”

Right, nothing is further from the truth than Donald Trump trying to thwart the Constitution.

But that’s the pattern: a trial balloon disguised as a “joke” for plausible deniability that soon becomes hard fact without so much as a shrug let alone an explanation.

It’s hard to imagine how all this will play out, given the speed at which it’s happening. It’s equally hard to see how that pace can be sustained, or where we’ll be in four years, or that this madness can carry on that long without exploding or imploding. But we are headed down a very dark path.

Recall how fast a certain Austrian-born politician consolidated power after ascending to the chancellorship of his grievance-filled nation via legal means. In less than six months, he had the authority to enact laws without the Reichstag’s consent, all other political parties had been banned, and civil liberites had been suspended under the Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reich President’s Emergency Decree for the People and State).

See you in July ’25!

In the second part of this essay, we will get into the weeds of what mass deportation would look like, with ICE raids, mass arrests of whole families, and establishment of a gulag archipelago of privately-conracted concentration camps. When it comes, we will see, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, just how free and brave we really are.

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Photo: Gleeful Trump supporters at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last July, blithely unaware of how they will look to history. Alex Wong/Getty Images.