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Today,  senior political reporter Nicole Narea explores whether Donald Trump could actually make good on his promises to launch mass deportations if elected, and what it could look like if he does. 

In a speech at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, former President Donald Trump reiterated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history” on day one of a second term.

That raises two questions: If he wins the election, could he even do that? And if so, how would it work?

The answer to the first question is a little complicated. While presidents have broad powers over immigration, there are operational, legal, and political challenges associated with his plans that involve invoking an 18th-century legal authority that hasn’t been used since World War II. And though public support for the policy appears to be growing, it’s not clear Americans actually know what they’re asking for.

The answer to the second question is more straightforward: If Trump and his allies can overcome those obstacles, history provides a clear — and devastating — picture of how a federal mass deportation program might go.

The US has previously implemented mass deportation programs targeting Mexicans in the 1950s and during the Great Depression. But never has a deportation initiative targeted so many people, especially those who have lived in the US for years — or even decades — and have family here.

For that reason, Trump’s plans may be even more disruptive than previous mass deportation programs, terrorizing families and tearing apart communities where undocumented immigrants have planted roots.

Here’s what this new iteration of mass deportations might look like, based on what we’ve seen before and what we know about Trump’s plans.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Trump promised a mass deportation program even larger than Operation Wetback, an Eisenhower administration plan under which 1.3 million people were deported in the 1950s.

But he didn’t elaborate on the specifics of his plans until a rally in Aurora, Colorado, earlier this month, when he announced that he intends to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law passed as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts. He is naming the plan “Operation Aurora,” after the city, which he has falsely portrayed as under siege from immigrant criminals.

The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from countries at war with the US. It was last used during World War II to detain civilians of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. The US government later apologized for their internment and provided reparations to those of Japanese descent, but the law remained on the books — ready for Trump to pluck out of obscurity.

Trump has indicated that he intends to first target “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” That reportedly includes members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In July, the Biden administration sanctioned the gang, putting it on a list of transnational criminal organizations and announcing $12 million rewards for the arrests of three leaders.

Trump said in Aurora that, if he wins a second term, he would “send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol, and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country.”

“And if they come back into our country, they will be told it is an automatic 10-year sentence in jail with no possibility of parole,” he said.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have suggested that they would not just stop at gang members. When pressed for a number, Vance previously said they would set a goal of 1 million deportations. That would potentially encompass people who aren’t violent criminals and who have lived in the US for years if not decades.  

Experts have  raised concerns that, even more so than during Operation Wetback and the immigration raids of the Great Depression, US citizens (including American children of immigrants) could get caught in the fray. Tom Homan, Trump’s former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and current immigration adviser, has said that families would be deported together, apparently including US citizens.

Deportations on the scale Trump is proposing (especially if they swept up US citizens) could result in knock-on effects — including to the economy — that Trump has not publicly discussed.

“The target population today is so much more varied and has been here for so much longer a period of time, and spans so much more geography as well as labor market areas and occupations,” Meissner said. “It would be much more disruptive and likely result in severe violations.”

There are a lot of problems with Trump’s plan.

For one, it’s impractical from an operational standpoint. Getting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, detention facilities, and immigration courts staffed to the levels Trump’s plan would need would require massive investment. That money would have to be approved by what may well be a divided Congress. 

“Every possible institution involved in this is already hugely overburdened and would be pretty much crippled in trying to handle the workload,” Meissner said. “It’s just a recipe for institutional breakdown.”

Even if the capacity existed, any mass deportation program would likely rely on state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the National Guard. But only state officials aligned with Trump, such as those in Texas and Florida, may be willing to activate those law enforcement capacities on his behalf.

"We would see migrant communities in Republican states take the heaviest hit,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and author of the forthcoming book, Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien.” “On the flip side, [there could be] a lot of foot-dragging, if not outright resistance, by states and cities and counties led by Democrats.”

Invoking the Alien Enemies Act might also be illegal. As Katherine Yon Ebright, liberty and national security counsel at the Brennan Center, notes in a recent report, the law has never faced a challenge under the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. 

Trump would also have to make the case that he is justified in invoking a wartime power. The US is not currently at war, though Trump and his allies are trying to paint the picture that it is. In public remarks, Trump has said that the US is facing the “greatest invasion in history” at the southern border, that it must protect against an “enemy from within,” and that immigrants are “totally destroying our country.”

The last time the Alien Enemies Act was challenged in court in 1948, a federal judge sided with the Truman administration. Ebright writes that the court was reluctant to overstep the president’s wartime powers in the period following World War II.

Trump may also find sympathizers on the federal bench: He stacked the courts with Republican judges during his first term and has a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.

But if he goes through with his plans, Trump may also have to confront renewed political opposition. Voters have become more anti-immigration during the Biden administration, but if Trump pushes too far, he might find that trend reverses. Americans rallied behind immigrants and increasingly supported higher levels of immigration during his first term; Democrats may again organize themselves in opposition to his policies.

“I think the Trump administration, the second time around, could certainly breathe fear into millions of people around the United States,” García Hernández said. “But I think the more that they do that, the more that they’ll rile up the folks who under the Biden administration have really turned their attention to other matters.”

 Correction, October 28: Monday's newsletter, about the potential impact of another Trump presidency on foreign affairs, misstated the year that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down. It was in 2014.

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A recent Quinnipiac survey of Michigan found that 57 percent of women in the state are backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris,  compared with 40 percent of men. Conversely, 56 percent of men back former President Donald Trump, while 37 percent of women do. That trend has repeatedly been the case in national polls, too.

“It’s the battle of the sexes, and it’s no game,” Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy said in a statement. “There is a glaring gap in Michigan and Wisconsin between the number of women supporting Harris and the number of men supporting Trump.”

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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