Also media Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things crumbling and how.
To pick up the pieces.
Wooing we love to crumble.
Yeah, and part of that is understanding what is going to happen and how it is going to happen, and absorbing that knowledge and what you can do with it. So today James is going to tell us about Trump's plans for migrants.
Yep, yeah, I guess in terms of what's going to happen, we don't know, right. Trump said a lot of stuff in his first term and kind of didn't stick the landing, a lot of it he tried. But they're more experienced now and I think crucially they have a much more favorable Supreme Court and then probably will have an even more favorable Supreme Court by the end of this term. So a plan to deport up to a million people this year was one of the very few concrete and
tangible promises that the Trump campaign made, Right. They had a lot of vibes, nasty vibes, but like in terms of like we will do X by Y, this was one of the very few. Now, Trump tried to deport a lot of people in his first term, right, like The one consistent part of his policy ever since he rode sideways down an escalator in twenty fifteen and then shit talked to Mexican people, has been an anti migrant policy. He didn't really stick the landing on mass deportations in
his first term. In fact, Biden deported more people in twenty twenty three than Trump did in any year of his first term. In fact, Trump also fell behind Obama in terms of deportations per year. None of that means that he won't be able to do that this time, right, I'm just trying to put some numbers on his promises the last time, so I want to look first at how he could go about his promise in his second term. Right. One thing that he said he will do is use
Title forty two again. So if people have not listened to the series I did last May or June on Title forty two, I would like to direct them there.
Title forty two is a reminder.
It's a public health law, and it's public health law that, in this interpretation, allowed CBP, specifically Border Patrol, to immediately return people to Mexico without processing them first. Sometimes they call it catch and release. Right, what it resulted in was these are not technically deportations. But when Trump said something, I don't think he's considering the exact meanings of what
he's saying. Right, So, if we look at Title forty two expulsions, if he's going to bring back Title forty two, reaching that one million per year number is pretty easy.
In fact, that happened in twenty twenty two again under Biden. Right, So if he considers those to be deportations, and that's within his one million per year goal, it's reasonable that he will reach to say that he will be able to reach that, and he will be able to do that with the current infrastructure, right without massively upgrading CBP, ice, ice, detention facilities, immigration judges.
All those things.
Yeah, So, like, if we consider those to be deportations, and one million a year is very much something that we might well see.
Do you know where we're at this year or it hasn't been released yet.
I don't know.
In twenty twenty two was the last stats I could find I linked to the CBP. If people want to look at the title forty two and title so Title eight, it's the immigration law under which people are normally received. Right, Title forty two ended in May of twenty twenty three. May eleventh, twenty twenty three with the end of the COVID nineteen emergency, because the reason they were using public health law as immigration law was because of this health emergency.
Right now, obviously it was used extremely cynically. For instance, there weren't exemptions for vaccinated people, but nonetheless that's why they were using it. And when the federal emergency for COVID nineteen ended, so did Biden's.
Excuse for using Title forty two.
That I will link to the CBP data center in the notes so people can see Title forty two versus Title late over the last few years. As I pointed out last week, the US can also fund deportations of migrants further south, and it's done this at Panama. I've had a series from there last week. People haven't listened to it. I would love them to do so, but the numbers that they've been able to achieve they are pretty low, and I don't think that's really going to
meaningfully impact his target. So let's talk about what everyone is most afraid of, which is mass deportations of people who are already living in the United States. Right that is definitely what his right wing trolls have been sort of hyping up, certainly over the last few weeks, right, the idea that they are going to come to your house and find you if you're an undocumented person in
the United States. So to talk about this, I want to talk about, first of all, like the real nuts and bolts of how he would be able, if he would be able to do this right. And I draw very heavily here on a report by the American Immigration Council who did some calculations on the cost of a single ice detention, right, the cost of a single raid, the amount of agents that will be required to meet this kind of capacity. And there are two models that they use, and those are the models I think are
most relevant. If we look at people who are in the United States without permanent legal status, we make an estimate for numbers, we're looking at about eleven million undocumented people.
That's not going to be perfect, but if we use that as a ballpark, and then two point three million people who have entered since the end of Title forty two, and they're on various forms of bail or parole or bond and they don't have a permanent status here either rent, So we're looking at somewhere in the region of thirteen million. If Trump wanted to deport all of those people now, to do that, he would need to massively expand ICE
detention facilities. About half of ICE's staff aren't Countrary to what you might believe about ICE kicking in people's doors and deporting them, half of ICE's staff work for something called Home Security Investigations. It's not that those people don't do deportations. They do, but they mostly focus on human trafficking,
drug trafficking, transnational crime. Now, sometimes as people also do deportations, people might be familiar with the big HSI raids on certain employers who are employing a lot of undocumented people.
Those still result in deportations, but that's not their primary tasking, and HSI has historically preferred not to do the deportation work because they feel that that makes it very hard for them to do the other work of like monitoring human and drug trafficking, because evidently migrants are going to be scared to go anywhere near HSI if they know that HSI could deport them, right, so they're not going.
To talk to them.
Now, it would be very easy for Trump to retask those those agents, right, that would obviously undermine work it's done to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking. Whether or not he cares is a question that's you know, I think I probably have an answer for that. I guess up for debates somewhat. So Trump has already called in addition to potentially re equipping those HSI agents, he said he wants to employ ten thousand more Border Patrol agents.
Right now.
BP agents can do deportations, but it's not BP agents who are coming to your door in Chicago and coming after you, right that that's ICE Immigration and Customs enforcement. He's also said he wants to give borderploal agents a ten thousand dollars retention bonus and a ten percent raise. Just to put it in the perspective, there are twenty thousand BP agents right now, so that would be about a fifty percent increase.
Right. This is not something he can do quickly.
They need to go through the academy, They need to be recruited, trained, background check, et cetera. Border Patrol has a lot of waivers right now, so you can we can waive requirements that other law enforcement agencies would have few to work for them, if that makes sense, right, be it a ged or a college degree or another language or whatever. They are offering waivers a lot right now. They can increase that number of waivers to recruit more people, right,
but that would still take a long time. So the estimate the American Immigration Council has is that to remove all of those thirteen million people in that's sort of in the one mass deportation as opposed to a million people a year scenario, would require between two hundred and twenty and four hundred and nine thousand stuff.
Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, that is a lot of people.
So I mean, like, for comparison as to how many that actually is the United States military active duties about a million people.
Yes, that was exactly. That's a comparison, Not the Army, not the Navy, the military, yeah, like all of it.
Yeah, this would put DHS at like substantially more personnel than like the Marine Corps, right, Like.
Yeah, not that people don't want to do, it's just like it is. Actually, we've talked a lot about how there are not guard rails on Trump like there were last time. That is true, and that is a very realistic thing to like be worried about and scared about. But that we're not just talking about guard rails. We are talking about a legist stickle hurdle. It is not a simple or necessarily possible thing to make an agency like that that much larger and have it actually function.
Like just this is just physics we're talking about here. Yeah, it's the same with anything. If cool Zone suddenly received one hundred billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and he said, do anything you want with it, we could not scale up to half.
A million employees like we have.
We have absolutely no capacity to handle that.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like, I think what people have to remember is that every doal kicking ice agent needs to enable us. Right, They need paid they need health insurance, they need human resources, they need training. This would take a very long time. Sorry, it's one point three million or so. Okay, I think it's a little less.
That's twenty seventeen data, so probably it's probably as closer to a million now, but yeah, slightly over a million, so but this is close to that's close to half, right.
Yeah, that's in addition to what they already have. Yeah, it's four hundred and nine plus whatever they have. It would also, of course mean like stantially increasing their investigative capacity because most deportations right now, when ICE arrest someone happened when someone else has already arrested that person. So like the person who's in detention federally or on a state level for something else that they did and they're undocumented,
and that's when ICE can take them and deport them. Right, So they'd have to also increase their ability to search out and find people, not saying they can't, but you can't take you know, fucking Tim Poole bring him into ICE. He's not going to instantly know how to find people where to find people, right, So like this, this will take time.
There is a practical.
Constraint on him doing this, even if there aren't other constraints within the balance of powers. So Stephen Miller, dude with the giant head.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be more specific when we talk about like conservatives who are about to come into power who have like.
A weirdly huge head.
Yeah, okay, that's like, find me a Californian who has strong opinions on gluten.
Yeah that's me. I'm I'm PROGUREAE.
Yeah. Yeah, so Stephen Miller is he as the guy who's crafted a lot of Trump's nefarious border policies.
Right.
It was Miller who who sook out Title forty two. And I want to talk about this a bit later. One thing that Miller did effectively, I don't want to say well, because it was objectively horrible. But one thing that Miller was good at was finding this obscure piece of public health law and mobilizing it against migrants.
Right.
I think if you'd spoken to me in twenty fifteen and said what do you think Trump's going to do against migrants, I wouldn't have said, oh'll be Title forty two, the United States Code, you know, that regulates public health. He or people within his team were very effective at finding that and using that effective enough that the Biden administration kept it for three years after the Trump administration did it for one year. Right, And so Miller could
find some niche kind of law. What he wants to do is use the national guard from cooperative states, right, Yeah, and to use a national guard from cooperative state in states that are not cooperative and where local law enforcement would not cooperate.
Right.
So some quote unquote sanctuary states, and there's probably an overstatement. They don't in theory refer and document to people they arrest to ICE for deportation. Right now, what federal fusion centers do is allow for that even if it is a sanctuary state. Actually, but in theoretical terms, a sanctuary state would not at least contact ICE about every undocumented person they're arrested.
Right.
So Bill's plan is to use the National Guard. Again, like, that's not what the National Guard does right now. They're not really trained up for doing that either.
Right.
I've seen plenty of National Guard folks on the border fort It's a bunch of scared eighteen year olds, right who are trying to get money from Robert and I have met Texas National.
Guide on the board, their kids, their kids. Yeah.
Now, to be fair, that's not saying they're they're like innocent or inherent Like every group of soldiers who has done any good or bad things, and often but usually both at the same time, it's a bunch of scared eighteen year old kids. Yes, that's been the case for ten thousand years. Yeah, that's true.
Anytime you have conflict reporting, you it's always shocking how young people are.
It's always just like, oh, okay, all wars are fought by children. There's no non child soldiers, with the exception of I mean, that is the weird thing about the Ukraine War, right Yet, Like I remember the first time I wound up at the front there, it was like, oh, this is actually it is actually old men fighting this war, old men who repeatedly told me it's either me or my kid shows up here. And I already fucking lost my soul in Afghanistan. Yes, Like I literally had that
interview with people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's crazy to me people who were in Afghanistan and have fighting again.
Yeah, I mean I think those guys are probably out now. I'm talking fifty Yeah, I.
Think twenty twenty forty, so it's forty years late. I'm sure they're too old now.
But Robert talking of being too old, I'm voting. I'm not too old to be obliged to transition to advertisement. So that's what we're going to do.
You're never too old for that, James.
In fact, the older you get, it's kind of like how if you reread Moby Dick at different points in your life, it's a completely different novel every ten years, different book. The same thing is true with ulysses, and the same thing is true with these advertisements. That's right, save them, record them on your home device in every couple of months, listen and you'll learn something new from chumpa casino every time.
All right, we're back, and I hope you've downloaded that chump of casino advert for later. And in the event of a great down scenario, you could have a whole library of those to listen to. So, talking of obscure legislations, we did right. Trump and his team have mentioned this thing called the Alien Enemies Act. It sounds like alien Ant Farm, but it's not in any way related.
Sadly, not nearly as good as for one thing, it's cover of smooth Criminal Terrible terrible.
Yeah, no, nowhere near the the same standard. That's a joke for people who are over thirty.
Yes, anyone who tries to dance to that alien Ant Farm song today not only has to think about the fact that Michael Jackson was definitely a pedophile, but also their needs no longer work.
It's a lose.
Are just sadly shuffling along, properly mood walking while crying, uh taking iberprofen.
I was at a street light show in Portland that was all millennials and every time, like the pit was crazy, but also it sounded like a cement mixer when everybody's knees got.
Going, doting out hyperprofen in the way out.
You're going to need this tomorrows.
So the Alien Enemies Act, it hasn't been used since the United States used it in the Second World War for in tournament camps, right, which, at least for many of us, is a part of national shame. I guess, like a pretty terrible fucking thing that the United States did. Obviously, for some folks in the Trump administration, this is something that they're kind of aspiring to. I guess Trump has said that he would like to use this to deport
gang members. That's not really what it's for. And like even sources within DHS have pointed out that they would have to prove that these migrants were sent by a foreign government, right, or someone that the US is at war with. This is going to be hard because, like if we look at Venezuelans, who are representing a larger and larger proportion of migrants since the elections, there they will actively shit talk the government of their country at
the first opportunity. I have met hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan migrants in California and in the Dallian Gap, and yeah, you're not going to find people who you can plausibly say were sent by Maduro that way. Yeah, but Miller's pretty good at finding these obscure laws and ways of doing things. So we would be fully to write this off entirely. But I don't think that will
make up the bulk of these mass deportations. So I want to go to that American Immigration Council report, which our link in the show notes, right, assuming a million deportations a year, which is what jd. Vance said to the New York Times, that's the sort of steady deportation scenario as opposed to the mass deportation of thirteen million people scenario, which a steady one is is more realistic
in terms of practicality rate. The cost of that, assuming that twenty percent of undocumented people decided to leave on their own, would be about eighty eight billion a year, which is a large amount of money. We'll talk in a little bit about what you could get with that money. A one off mass deportation would cost about three hundred
and fifteen billion. The detention costs alone for that one off massed deportation of eleven to thirteen million people would be one hundred and sixty seven point eight billion dollars, which is probably why private prison group geo Groups stock swed this week. Right, if Trump wants to deport people, the average deportee is detained for fifty nine days before they're deported, and so they are going to massively have
to increase their capacity. Right now, their current detention contract includes a minimum of twenty nine seven hundred and ninety beds between like increases and other facilities they have access to, and early twenty twenty four, according to the American Immigration Council, they detain thirty nine thousand people. Astute listeners will notice that eleven million and thirty nine thousand are quite quite
desparate as numbers go. So, ah, yeah, I mean you're talking about a huge percentage of Like we'll get into this later, but in California, Texas, and Florida it's between five and six percent of the population are undocumented. Right, you're talking about building prisoned cities. If you were to detain that many people then one fell swoop. Again, that takes time, but in this case it's private sector actors
like Geogroup, they can tend to move a little bit faster. Right, So to put that cost in terms of things that the government could do with the money instead, right, a decade of one million deportations a year means foregoing forty four hundred and fifty elementary schools or two point nine million new homes, or funding the head Start program for
seventy nine years. A single year of mass deportation would cost nearly twice the National Institute of Health's annual budget, or eighteen times a global annual expenditure on cancer research.
So I guess that's shit that we could have instead.
But that's not all because undocumented households, contrary to what you might have heard, paid taxes. And if we deported every undocumented person in the United States, we look at twenty twenty two numbers, undocumented households paid forty six point eight billion in federal taxes and twenty nine point three billion in state and local taxes. That's a huge amount of tax revenue forgone right. Absolutely, Yeah, that again, that won't be the end of it, because some industries like
construction and agriculture rely heavily on undocumented labor. And if you're worried about the cost of your groceries, now, now if people voted for Donald Trump because that EGGX costs more, shit will cost an awful lot more if we deport the undocumented people working in agriculture. Right, sectors of that industry do not function economically without underpaid migrant labor.
And this is something that migrants are very aware of.
Actually I broadcast interview with one of them last week, But they know that they will be underpaid because they're undocumented, but they still think that that's worth it for them to be safe.
Right.
So for going that, I don't think Trump has not proposed a solution to this right length these sort of this long form thinking is not what he does certainly in his speeches, but that would have a massive impact on the economy. What he would also need to do is persuade the countries that these migrants come from to take them back, and that has historically been something that has been extremely difficult.
The State Department.
Doesn't see the sort of process of persuading people to accept migrants as really within its remit and it certainly sort of bristle that having to do this the last Trump administration. I think a mass deportation like this it would trigger some nations refusing to take people back, for instance, to Venezuela. Right, Venezuela is already not taking people back from Panama. You at the US funds deportations for Panama.
Venezuela and Panama ceased relations after the election in Venezuela and Panama rightly claiming that that was a fraudulent election, and as a result, Panama is now looking for a third country to deport these people too. If the US attempted to deport potentially millions to people to Venezuela again, there's no guarantee that Madua has to accept them back, right.
I can hear a lot of people saying, how is that allowed.
To not accept take them back?
Yeah?
I mean international law is like it's a unicorn, Like you know, if everyone agrees that they see it, and they see it, but it's not real, right, So like who is going to make them I guess, like like whether it's allowed or not, it's kind of immaterial. Madua is not how to steal the election right, you're not allowed to abuse human rights. Migrants are allowed to cross any country they want and claim asylum anywhere that they
feel safe. But like here we are so yeah, in theory the country should accept its citizens back and practice will it?
I don't know, certainly.
It becomes like a bigger issue when you have millions of people, right, And if we have millions of people deported back, then like if we can't deport them, where are we going to detain them? That gets back to the cost of detentions, right, talking of costs should probably cover the costs of our podcasting set up here by pivoting to adverts again, Yeah, we are back, and for the final segment here, I want to talk about who
Trump could pursue with these deportations. Right, there's two major groups. The obvious starting point would be two point three million people who cross between January of twenty twenty three and April of this year, before Biden signed his asylum bad to be prescribed. That to two million, two hundred and sixty four, eight hundred and thirty. Those people don't have permanent immigration status. Those are the people who you've heard
from on this podcast who are in cucumber right. The people who we've interviewed for the last year and a bit now. They have various immigration status, but none of them are permanent. None of them have permanent residency. All of them are obviously registered.
Right.
They normally have a notice to appear in court, which would make them easy to find and potentially easy to deport.
The other group of.
People are the undocumented migrant who have been here for longer than that. Many of them have most have been in the country for more than a decade. They're working, They often have citizen children right because of birthright citizenship. Most of the pay taxes. Most of these people have some form of revocable legal status, so that might be
something called a temporary protected status. We talked about a temporary protected status last week as well, but it applies to people who are already in the country when it's granted, and it allows them to stay for a designated period of time while it's not safe to deport them to their home country.
Let's say there's been a war or a natural disaster.
Right, it's not safe to deport them, but it gets renewed two months before the end of that period. Let's say it renews every eighteen months, and you find out two months before the end of that period if it's not going to be renewed. If they didn't renew those TPSS, those people could either change status or would become undocumented. The TPS has existed since nineteen ninety and they're about eight hundred and sixty thousand people on TPS right now.
The other major category that people will probably be more familiar with are dreamers, people who came to the United States as children and are undocumented, but they benefit from something called Darker Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and about eight hundred and thirty four thousand young people benefit from this, which allows them to receive a renewable two year period of deferred action from deportation. Trump did try and go
after this in his previous term in twenty eighteen. He ended up in a two year court battle which sort of finished up with NAACP versus Trump, and that ran out the clock on his term and Biden reinstated Darker. But again, because people have to register for Darker, their whereabouts are easier for someone like Ice to potentially find. Then after that, we have people who entered without being detected. We have people who overstayed their visas. Those people might
be harder to find, right. The model of the undocumented migrant that people have in their head comes across the border with carpet shoes, sneaks past a BP checkpoint, and then lives in the United States without ever encountering migration authorities. That's actually not the majority model, but those people do exist, and that they would be harder for ICE to find potentially. Trump is also vowed to end parole programs that allow
Ukrainians and Afghans to enter the USA and work. I would think that some of those would be pretty unpopular. People have been much more broadly in sort of with Ukrainian migrants than they have with other migrants from other.
Parts of the world.
They'll say, but it would be an easy one again for him to end right. The last thing he's really said he wanted to do is to end birthright citizenship. Yep. That is I spoke about this before in our Agenda forty seven episodes. That's pretty clear in the fourteenth Amendment they have some kind of fringes on the flag legal theory around this, but like I would think that that
would require a constitutional amendment. But who knows, because he might have both Houses and the Supreme Court on his side, so he might just be able to get away with doing that. This obviously wouldn't rescind citizenship from people who
have previously have children who are citizens. Talking of people have children as citizens, they are about four million mixed status families in the United States, so this deportation plan could potentially separate parents from children and children from parents, children from their older parents who they take care of. It could destroy these families, right, Deportations always destroy families.
I've seen this happening myself, and it's horrible. The states where this would most likely happen the states are the highest documented population at California, Texas, and Florida. California thus far retains its sanctuary policies. Texas Florida very much do not, right, and so those would be the states where they will be the highest risk of this happening. That's between five and six percent of their population. And that's kind of
where I want to finish up today. I've got some more stuff I wanted to say about his border policy, but I think I'm going to say that for another episode, because the border and immigration are different things. And I think sometimes this is something that a lot of legacy media doesn't understand. They have immigration reporters who report immigration law, the stuff i've spoken about today, but the border is not somewhere that they go, and it's not something that
they cover very well. If you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I've spent a lot of time at the border on the ground, in the mountains, in the desert, and that's something that we've covered in great depth here and I'm pretty happy that listeners have a really complete understanding of it.
Would California actually be able to enforce being a sanctuary state or.
Now, yes, in the it's law enforcement doesn't have to caught ice, right. The federal government cannot compel local law enforcement to state law enforcement to do its work.
That is very well established.
Again, nothing's off the cards when you have both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. But again that would take time and it would take a court battle. So what they can do now is not report those people right, not say hey, we got someone here, he came in because we found him with a bag of weed. He's undocumented. You know, he was driving thirty five and a thirty,
he's undocumented. These are things that people who are undocumented have to worry about, right, Like, for those of you who don't have undocumented folks in your life, Like it's a speeding ticket, it's the most minor in it's not paying a parking ticket and ending up in court, right Like, this shit is so minor to so many people, but it could tear someone's life apart. And so I want to like finish up by saying that, Yeah, Texas and
Florida are going to be the places where we see this. Yeah, five percent of the population is a large amount of your population. If he even attempts half of that, people are going to see this. It's going to happen in your community. Now, I'm not saying he will, but if it does, like the time to start organizing to protect people you care about is now. Be that with their nations, to groups like Alo Torolalo, who have successfully sued the
Trump and Bien administrations for my goods rights. Be that with organizing such that your own documented friends don't end up in court because they couldn't pay a parking ticket, right even if that means you paying someone giving someone fifty bucks for a parking ticket so that it doesn't ruin the rest of their life.
Whatever it is. The way that we.
Prevent this is through strong communities. We have to start putting those now. I know we've said this a lot this week, but we're probably going to say a lot for the next three months. It's like a lot of people have reached out to me since the Trump election, which was two days but also like seven years ago, because that's how time works, saying that they want to
participate in mutual aid at the border. I would love for you to come and join us, of course it would, And like I think people have heard a lot about our mutual aid setup because of something I do a lot, but that I don't want you to come here and do mutual aid tourism, Like I want you to come here and understand and learn what we do and then do it yourself, or just do it yourself, like there was a time when this didn't exist and people started it right and you can start it to And I'm
not going to tell you, like the specifics of what I think you should do, because I don't know. I don't know what the legal environment will be. I don't know what the legal environment will be in your state. But whatever the legal environment is, it will be better if we have strong and cohesive communities to look after one another.
Right. If you're looking to donate your money.
I've said it before ALOTLAO where I would suggest it.
It's a L t R O l A d O dot org.
They've done really valuable work in defending migrants rights in court. Haitian Bridge Alliance would be another great example of that. Will you link that, I'll put them both in the show notes.
Yeah.
But the way we confront this is together. And it's super important that now in the next three months of that are and documented people in your life so that you check in with them, that you talk with them about what the best plan is. We don't know what's going to happen. I've outlined some scenarios here. None of them may happen, right, We don't know yet, but we have these three months and we'd be foolish not to use them.
Ye.
Yeah, talk to your friends, begin organizing. The solution is not to spare. The solution is community, and I know it can be really to spare. And if you're listening and you are and documented, I understand how petrifying this is, and just know that, like we're all thinking of you and hopefully there are people in your life who are there to help you and to help you get through a difficult time.
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