“In September, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote for The New York Times about the worldwide proliferation of designs for the FGC-9, a partially 3D-printed weapon that can “be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally.”
As one expert told the reporters: “Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?””
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“Another mass-deportation program—known by the offensive title of “Operation Wetback,” referencing a slur about Mexicans who got wet illegally crossing the Rio Grande—took place during the Eisenhower administration. That operation, which was backed by Mexican authorities who faced a labor shortage per the same report, didn’t directly use the military. But the Border Patrol used military techniques—and it ensnared many U.S. citizens.
I doubt politicians who have engaged in rhetorical attacks on immigrants will worry about their hardships, but shouldn’t they be concerned about what it will mean for U.S. citizens? During the 1950s operation, “Border agents raided Mexican American neighborhoods, demanded ID from ‘Mexican-looking’ citizens in public, invaded private homes in the middle of the night and harassed Mexican-owned businesses,” according to Axios.
Our Constitution upholds due process. The government cannot simply grab people off the street. It needs to follow a legal process. Every accused person gets their day in court to make their case. As George Washington famously said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence—it is force.”
Unleashing such force on a broad scale will not result in precise, humane, and just results. Government agents will conduct raids. Illegal residents often live among legal ones. Wide swaths of the population will get caught up in the dragnets.”
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“As someone who has hired construction workers in towns without large immigrant labor pools, I’m skeptical that large numbers of native-born Americans will jump at these newfound opportunities. The incoming administration embraces the Lump of Labor Fallacy—the idea that jobs are a zero-sum game where one person’s job comes at the expense of another’s job. In reality, more labor spurs economic growth and business development. That’s how market economies work.”
“Kevin Yang, a 46-year-old undocumented immigrant from China, said he once felt a sense of indebtedness toward the United States. But now, with President-elect Donald Trump’s second term on the horizon, he feels worried and on edge.
“The gratitude I once felt toward the U.S for accepting me into the country … has now shifted to anxiety and fear, Yang said. “And I know others in my situation feel the same.”
With the incoming Trump administration looking to prioritize deporting Chinese nationals, citing national security concerns, many undocumented Chinese men say they couldn’t feel further afield from the reasoning behind the potential policy — that Trump thinks they’re assembling an army within the United States.”
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“having fled their homeland because of political persecution, or uprooted their lives for better economic opportunities, many undocumented Chinese men reject the notion of being a threat to the United States as absurd.”
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“While Asian immigrants have long been the fastest-growing undocumented population, the number of Chinese nationals crossing into the United States in particular has skyrocketed in recent years. Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, the number of undocumented Chinese nationals crossing both the northern and southern borders has tripled, from just over 27,000 to more than 78,000.
Experts and undocumented immigrants have said that China’s economic downturn and political friction, which came to a head during the country’s prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, were largely the basis of the migration wave. But Trump has repeatedly suggested that “military-age” men are conspiring to build an army.”
“During Trump’s first term, sanctuary cities refused to allow local law enforcement to share information with federal immigration agents or hand over immigrants in their custody. This time around, many are planning to do the same, even if doing so draws them into a fight with the second Trump administration.
Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a named contributor to its Project 2025 manifesto, has indicated the incoming administration plans to make sanctuary jurisdictions targets for “mass deportations.” Homan said recently he hopes that local law enforcement will cooperate with requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hand over undocumented immigrants already in their custody, especially when they pose a public safety threat.
“What mayor or governor doesn’t want public safety threats out of their communities?” he told the Center Square. “Their No. 1 responsibility is to protect their communities. That’s exactly what we are going to do.”
Most Democratic leaders, however, have made it clear that they will not accept federal government overreach on deportations and that they are preparing to challenge Trump’s immigration policies in court.
“We’re not looking for a fight from the Trump administration, but if he attacks our progress, we’ll fight back,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Vox. “Immigrants are such a critical part of who we are … who we will be.””
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“In his first term, Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions took two forms: attempting to withhold federal funding from them and challenging their policies in court.”
“According to the New York Times, Trump is planning to invoke the Insurrection Act to bring in the military to carry out mass deportations. The law is a key exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military to enforce federal law without the permission of Congress or the Constitution.
Only in rare instances have presidents invoked the Insurrection Act. President George H.W. Bush was the last one to do so amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots that broke out in response to the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also notably used the Insurrection Act to facilitate the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The provision of the Insurrection Act most likely to apply in Trump’s case is one that allows the president to unilaterally activate the military domestically to enforce federal law whenever they determine that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion… make it impracticable [to do so] by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
Mirasola said Trump would have a “relatively easy time” making the case that cartels trafficking immigrants across the border constitute an “unlawful obstruction” to the enforcement of US immigration law. Trump has in some ways appeared to begin building his case for invoking the Insurrection Act through his rhetoric on the campaign trail this year by describing an “invasion of criminals” coming across the border.
But Mirasola said it would be harder for Trump to argue that it is impracticable to enforce immigration laws through the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” That’s because presidents have done so for decades, and border crossings are no longer unusually high: They have sharply declined this year and are down even from certain points in the first Trump administration.
However, the law gives the president “sole discretion, in most instances” to determine whether the criteria necessary to activate the military have been met, according to 2022 congressional testimony given by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Joseph Nunn, the Center’s counsel in the national security program.
Goitein and Nunn also argued that the “vague and broad criteria for invoking the Act, combined with the lack of any provision for judicial or congressional review, render it ripe for abuse.” At that point, their concern was that Trump could have used the Insurrection Act to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election results. The use case is now different, but the potential for overreach is the same.
That is to say, while advocates may challenge Trump on whether the two key criteria for invoking the law have been met, the law gives presidents a wide berth — and the courts little power.
“For all practical purposes, courts have been cut out of the process,” Goitein and Nunn write.”
His plans increase the deficit, which is inflationary.
Large and broad tariffs are inflationary.
A massive crackdown on illegal immigration will also be inflationary as without cheap labor, making products will be more expensive or won’t happen here at all–particularly agricultural goods and housing.
Trump wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been in favor of lower interest rates, which will increase inflation.
“Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.”
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“The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.”
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“Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren’t directly impacted by Trump’s deportation plan.”
“government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”
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“The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
How has immigration contributed to U.S. growth?
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Are immigrants taking native-born workers’ jobs?
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.
“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.
Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.”
“If you go to Tijuana, right up to the border wall, you can see a deportation in its final throes. At the edge of a Mexican freeway that runs along the border, there’s a nondescript metal door. On any given morning, a Mexican official will open the padlock on the Mexican side and an American immigration agent will open the padlock on the U.S. side. Then, dozens—sometimes hundreds — of people get pushed back into Mexico. Some wander to shelters; others end up camping just outside the door, as if staying close by might improve their chances of getting back in. That deportation door got plenty of use under Donald Trump. But perhaps no president has used it more than Joe Biden.
You wouldn’t have guessed that watching Trump’s 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, where Trump brutalized the Biden-Harris administration over Biden’s immigration record, accusing the president of throwing the border open.”
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” Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the country, and that’s allowed Trump to repeatedly — almost gleefully — claim he’ll deport “millions” of people every year if he takes back the White House, something he says Biden is too feckless to do. It plays into his narrative that Biden is decrepit. If deportations are a gas pedal, Trump has portrayed Biden as a lethargic octogenarian, too impaired to drive over 10 mph. In reality, Biden has that gas pedal pushed almost all the way to the floor. Under Biden, migrants have been removed from the U.S. at a blistering pace, pushing the country’s deportation infrastructure to its limit. And it’s not clear how Trump could top him if he takes back the White House next year.
Biden’s migrant removals started as soon as he took office. In the spring of 2021, deep in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in a camp in Tijuana, where some migrants were so hopeful the new president would let them in that they flew “BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” flags outside their tents. But most of them who crossed got a slap from reality: They were quickly frog-marched by U.S. Border Patrol back through the deportation doorway, back to the squalid camps in cartel turf. Others got rapidly loaded onto ICE planes and flown back to Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever. As the number of people crossing the border grew during Biden’s first two years in office, these expulsions reached a scorching pace. ICE charter flights bounced around the globe like Taylor Swift’s jet. According to data collected by Tom Cartwright, a researcher with the advocacy group Witness at the Border, there were more ICE flights in the air during the early Biden years than ever before.
Biden’s expulsion regime was made possible by the most radical shift in immigration policy of the last 50 years: Title 42. When Biden took office, he undid dozens of Trump’s immigration policies, but he kept in place Trump’s most consequential ban, the public health statute Title 42. Using the pandemic as pretext, Title 42 gave the president the power to rapidly expel migrants without the normal court process. During just his first two years in office, Biden used it to kick out over 2.8 million migrants. That’s a stunning number. In Trump’s entire time in the White House, his administration removed only 2 million people total.
There’s an important caveat here. Even though millions of migrants got expelled during Biden’s first years in office, the number of deportations actually shrunk. Though they’re both a form of removal, expulsion and deportations are different: Title 42 expulsions were a brand new phenomenon. They could happen rapidly, without a trial, and the subject was almost always arrested near the border. Deportations, on the other hand, only come after an immigration judge officially orders someone removed, and they often involve people arrested in the interior. During Biden’s first two years in office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported under 200,000 people total — less than any single year during the Trump era.
You might think that’s because Biden didn’t want to deport people. His administration may have been comfortable kicking out migrants who just arrived, but deporting immigrants who have been here a long time is, of course, a different story. That hesitation was likely part of the reason deportations shrunk during the early Biden years. But there’s another reason: ICE — along with all the country’s deportation infrastructure — had been surged to the border. To handle the huge number of new arrivals, the administration sent ICE agents to assist Border Patrol, and that took government workers away from arresting people in the interior. Meanwhile, ICE Air flights were filled to the brim with recent border crossers; they literally didn’t have room for other deportees.
As soon as Title 42 ended in May 2023, deportations immediately skyrocketed to historic numbers. According to data analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Biden “removed or returned” 775,000 unauthorized immigrants from May 2023 to May 2024. That’s more than any previous year since 2010. (For comparison, Trump’s record for removals in one year maxed out at under 612,000 — and that was with Title 42 in place.)
Maybe, if he takes office next year, Trump will be able to get a bit more juice out of the deportation system and get his numbers higher. However, there are indications that the country’s deportation system is at its redline. With the current manpower and equipment, it just might not be possible to deport that many more people.”
“Fedora Castelino left India when she was only four months old, eventually settling in the United States at the age of six as a dependent on her father’s H-1B visa. Now almost 19, she’s staring down a deadline: In just two years, she might have to deport herself.
Castelino is one of over 200,000 “Documented Dreamers,” dependent visa holders who were brought to the U.S. legally as children and have resided here lawfully since. If they can’t secure a work visa or sponsorship for a green card before turning 21—a process made far more difficult by extreme application backlogs and wait times—they’re forced to self-deport. “It’s so hard to realize that I’ve lived here basically my entire life—this is actually not my home,” says Castelino. “Even after finishing all my schooling in America, I’m still not in a home country, which is really hard to accept.”
“These are individuals who’ve essentially been raised and educated here,” says Dip Patel, founder of Improve the Dream, which advocates for Documented Dreamers. “This is typically the only place they’ve known.” According to a survey conducted by Patel’s organization, Documented Dreamers were, on average, just five years old when they came to the United States.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, introduced by the Obama administration, shields undocumented “Dreamers” from deportation. Around 650,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children through no fault of their own are protected. But Documented Dreamers have received comparatively little attention from politicians.”