The following has been our Plan of Action for Immigration for decades. Clearly, President Trump has a very aggressive agenda of his own. It’s too early to tell if his newest plan will work, but we're convinced it won’t… not because we don’t like him, but because, if he deports as many people as he says, it will shock the U.S. labor market and the prices of the goods and services that undocumented workers help deliver will skyrocket.

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Because a sixth of the U.S. construction industry workforce – and just under a third of workers in trades like painting, drywall and roofing – are unauthorized migrants, housing prices will likely increase… as will the price of most agricultural goods since almost one million of our 2.5 million farmworkers are unauthorized. Obviously, higher prices are the last thing we (and Donald Trump’s presidency) need right now.

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Surely, our president has competent economists – as opposed to only people like his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller who says things like, “As God is my witness, you are going to see millions of people rapidly removed from this country who have no right to be here.” – who are telling him these things. After all, its Economics 101.

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But even beyond the economic factors, we can’t even logistically carry out his plans. It’s beyond ludicrous to believe that we can round-up 11 million people and deport them all. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is just full of it. Don’t believe us? Then consider this: Donald Trump – Mr. “Kick Everyone Out” himself – didn’t even make a dent in that number his first time around.

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Despite Donald the Deporter’s promise to remove millions of “illegal aliens” immediately after his first inauguration – “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.” – the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) combined carried out only 286,660 removals in 2017; 327,240 in 2018; and 347,230 in 2019. That is only 3 percent of the millions of unauthorized immigrants who already lived here.

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Republicans may be surprised to learn that the 286,660 removals in 2017 were much lower than the removals in every single year of the Obama presidency, and the number of removals in 2018 and 2019 were lower than six of the eight years under President Obama. Plus, most of these removals were people trying to get into the country, not people who were already here.

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Even with numbers far lower than what he promised, in its 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations report, ICE reported its operations were “significantly impacted” by the “high volume of migration, including unprecedented numbers of family unit and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) arrivals.” This, the report said, “stretched both Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) resources and those of the entire U.S. government to the breaking point and created a severe humanitarian crisis and border security crisis that continues to cripple the immigration system.”

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Does anyone honestly believe we can add 11 million more people to that level of chaos?

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It looks like the answer is already shaping up to be a big NO. Even though ICE was on a round-‘em-up roll for weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, by mid-February 2025 the agency was already struggling to get the numbers up and falling far short of the administration’s goals of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day – to the point where the administration stopped publishing daily numbers. And ICE probably won’t get closer to those numbers anytime soon because most of the “sanctuary” cities run by Democrats have already been raided, and the target lists ICE prepared between Election Day and Inauguration Day have been exhausted.

 

Judging from the first few months of Trump’s second term, it seems to us that, as The Economist so perfectly put it, he is focusing “on theatrical cruelty as a substitute for real action. Expect workplace raids with camera crews in tow, harsh internment in border states and ICE agents surging in sanctuary cities… the point is partly to deter would-be migrants. It is also to persuade voters that the government is serious.” But we also 100% agree with their conclusion that “cruelty for its own sake is wrong. By denying migrants’ humanity, it coarsens American values.” 

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So, for now we're just going to move forward with our original plan. As always, if the Trump administration is successful in its efforts, we're happy to make the necessary adjustments. We honestly don’t care where the ideas come from, we just want the very best ones.