Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.
Chapter 1: What are Donald Trump's mass-deportation plans?
He's promised the largest deportation in history — millions of people, potentially — And it starts on day one, according to Trump. Stephen Miller said the administration would A deportation policy on this scale would have enormous impact, not only on the lives of immigrants, but on their communities, on the U.S. economy, and much more.
To understand what's really possible come January, I'm joined by staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who's the author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, a definitive account published this year of the immigration crisis in America. Jonathan, before we get into the prospect of the Trump administration and a potential deportation, I want to ask you if you think looking back on the now completed campaign,
If the Democratic Party got immigration wrong, if the Biden administration ignored it for too long, as has been the critique all along from the Republicans.
I definitely think the Democrats and Biden specifically miscalculated in thinking that if they put their heads down and didn't talk about this, the issue would somehow pass or it would kind of dissolve in the general ether. And so they didn't really. Why would they do that? Well, it's tough news for Democrats all the time because the Republicans have a very simple, coherent message.
You know, it's plain and it's forceful and it's pithy. And that is, you know, shut down the border. Fewer people should enter the country. You know, America first. It's the whole litany. Whereas Democrats have this issue of needing to communicate something more nuanced, balancing a kind of humaneness with pragmatism at the border and beyond. And that's always been a hard message for Democrats.
And they've always kind of toggled between trying to seem tough and trying to do things that at least are a little bit different than the Republicans, even though basically the tools in their arsenal aren't all that different. That said, the Biden administration, to my mind, made two sort of major policy miscalculations. The first was clinging to a Trump era policy for too long.
It ostensibly was very tough. What it did was it allowed the government to summarily expel anyone who showed up at the southern border without giving them any real sense of due process or an opportunity to present claims for asylum. It seems like it would be an effective way of clearing the border when you need to for the federal government.
But in fact, it actually had a series of counterproductive effects because the government was expelling people en masse without any sort of orderly system around it. People were trying to cross multiple times. It didn't really stand up the asylum system or any of the border processing mechanisms that the Trump administration in its first term had sabotaged.
And so it allowed the Biden administration to have a kind of – illusion of control over the border when, in fact, the circumstances were really spiraling out of their control. That was the first thing.
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Chapter 2: Who is Stephen Miller and what is his role?
DeSantis kind of famously flew migrants to Martha's Vineyard to make the point that, how do you feel when it's in your backyard? But can we agree then that it was diabolically effective as politics? Yes.
I mean, I'll tell you, my conversations with top officials at the Department of Homeland Security all led to the same assessment, which was, you know, it was Greg Abbott more so than it was Ron DeSantis kind of driving this reality, but that Abbott single-handedly changed the way immigration played as a political issue in America as a result of this busing.
And to my mind, a profound mistake made by the administration was, was not intervening and doing something more active of its own. So what you had was you had all of these buses full of migrants being sent all across the country with the deliberate aim of causing chaos in cities and states far from the border. There was no coordination. The governor of Texas,
Governor Florida were deliberately not giving heads up to local or state officials. And so it was really overwhelming cities across the country. If the Biden administration had bit the bullet and tried to take on some of that process itself. Why didn't they? They were scared of the politics. And what are the politics? You know, the politics were—I mean, the attacks would write themselves.
The attacks would be, look what the Biden administration is doing. It's offering newly arrived immigrants, you know, bus tickets to whatever city they want. And that was the conversation inside the White House that, you know, the bruising political fight around this is going to be just too painful for us. And the operations themselves are complicated.
No one's denying that it's complicated to draw up plans to kind of relieve pressure at the border. But the Biden administration essentially— you know, was defensive and allowed someone like Greg Abbott to really run the table on them.
Did it seem to you that this was partially responsible for the shift in votes in blue states like New York?
I mean, I was struck by the fact that in some of the congressional districts, in and around the suburbs of New York City, you had large numbers of people in response to polls saying that the border crisis was out of control, it was motivating their decision to vote the way they did.
And what was so striking about that for me was for six or seven months, if not longer, before the election itself, the number of people arriving at the border had dropped substantially. And yet the perception in places like New York and beyond was that this was still an ongoing crisis.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of mass deportation?
No, I think it was both. I mean, I think the reality was undeniable that for cities and suburbs that were dealing with the recent arrival of relatively large numbers of people for whom they were not prepared, I think that was a really acute strain on a number of local resources.
I think it would have been manageable had the federal government been more proactive and had the messaging around it been a little bit more forthright. The Democrats tend to think, you know, we lose on this issue because, you know, nuance loses against kind of big, broad, ugly attack lines from Republicans.
But the net effect of it all is the public is just bombarded with the Republican line time and again. And there's really no countervailing narrative rhetoric explanation that unpacks a little bit what's happening. Yeah.
Now, on January 20th, Donald Trump becomes president and he has promises about day one and deportation. What is the rhetoric and what is going to be the reality?
You know, I have to say candidly, I don't know what's coming. I mean, we know that there's going to be all every manner of harshness, but the mechanics of mass deportation are complicated.
And so it's unclear to me, you know, when people like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's top immigration advisor, and now someone who's going to play a very influential role in the new White House, say, as he has said recently, that the incoming administration is going to deport up to a million people a year, people should be skeptical of that number, the magnitude of that number.
There's a huge amount of logistical coordination that would be required for that to work. How many undocumented immigrants are there? Well, there are upwards of 11 million undocumented people living in the United States, the majority of whom, it should be said, have lived here for more than a decade. And so, to my mind, one of the scariest things about what's coming
is the randomness of the roundups and arrests. So, you know, one of the things that has guided enforcement policy, certainly among Democrats over the recent years, is in light of the fact that there are so many undocumented immigrants who've been living in the United States who can't regularize their status because Congress is deadlocked, the government has to prioritize who it goes after.
For instance, people have committed crimes, you know, the whole kind of specific list of things.
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Chapter 4: How does immigration policy affect the economy?
In the first administration, Trump came into office with Miller and the whole lot of them. all planning to ramp up arrests and deportations from the interior of the country. So in other words, people who have been living here for many years, who are undocumented, whose legal status has lapsed and so on, they were going to be vulnerable. The government was going to go after them.
What happened in effect was the situation at the border, large numbers of people showing up because of conditions all across the region in Central America and beyond, seeking asylum at the southern border, the first Trump administration got in many ways distracted from its agenda for interior enforcement and instead had to pour a lot of its resources and time into border enforcement.
And so some of the harshest, most upsetting things we saw in the first administration had to do with the government's treatment of asylum seekers at the southern border. For example, families getting separated at the border.
That was all about trying to punish families who were showing up seeking asylum and basically mistreating them to such a degree, the hope was, that other people wouldn't even bother to make the trip. What's happening now is going to be different. In large part, the Democrats now have also ceded a lot of ground on the border itself and on the asylum issue itself.
And so as a result, you really already have a situation in which the border has been kind of locked down to a degree that it hasn't been before by Democrats. So Joe Biden has done a lot of the kind of original Trump bidding on cracking down on asylum seekers who cross between ports of entry, increasing penalties for people who try to cross illegally and so on. Are you saying the border is shut?
Well, the border is never shut. That's always been a kind of political fiction. But the numbers of people arriving at the southern border right now as a result of Biden policies and the policies of the government of Mexico are way down.
Now, Stephen Miller mentions criminal gangs, rapists, drug dealers and monsters that have murdered our citizens and we're going to send them home. What is the level of criminality among undocumented immigrants? Is it any different from the rest of the population?
You know, this is something that all through the first Trump administration we were constantly having to insist on. You know, immigrant populations in general... commit crimes at much lower rates than U.S. citizens. There is no evidence that there's mass criminality. There are always going to be one-off examples, and that's how these guys operate.
That's how Miller operates both on the campaign and during these administrations. They find individual instances of ugly violence committed by undocumented immigrants, and they blow that up as though it's emblematic of some sort of trend, and it's not. But
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Chapter 5: What are the potential legal issues with military involvement in deportations?
And so Trump, from the very beginning, on the campaign, now, J.D. Vance has been equally forceful on this. They've all said they're not only going to revoke these parole programs, but they're going to go immediately after the people who availed themselves of these parole programs.
Thomas Homan, who's going to be the so-called border czar, said – and I'm quoting him here – It's not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It's not going to be building concentration camps. And he also said they'd focus on targeted arrests. So what does that represent? How much daylight is there between Homan and Stephen Miller in their stances?
Homan, as you know, was an architect of family separation policy during Trump's first term along with Miller.
A lot of Obama-era officials were surprised by how harsh Homan sounded in Trump's first term because Homan had always been a tough law and order guy, immigration and customs enforcement, ICE lifer. But the view certainly in the second half of the Obama administration was that Homan is the kind of guy who may not agree with what our approach is but is a team player.
He can get the rank and file on board because people respect him based on his long career in the agency and so on. And so a lot of Obama-era officials called me shocked when Homan started to say some of the really tough-sounding things he said at the start of the first Trump administration.
And I also think that that's basically what he always felt, that he sort of was finally given a chance to be unfettered. And at the start of the first Trump administration – Quite literally, Homan was at his retirement party in January 2017 when he got a call from John Kelly, then Trump's DHS secretary, later his chief of staff, saying, listen, come back. Don't retire.
I mean, Homan excused himself from his retirement party at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He's going into the private sector, lucrative job. And he was basically lured back to head ICE because it was the kind of career ambition that he had harbored all these years.
When he says that they're going to be targeted operations and that the kind of concentration camps and all of the most nightmarish things that we've heard aren't going to come to pass. I don't think he's saying that because morally he's got a particular problem with those eventualities. I think it's more the fact that he is thinking about operations.
He is thinking in terms of nuts and bolts of what arrests can look like. What gives you the idea that he's lacking in any moral fiber? You know, I've spoken to him a number of times and I've just never been convinced that there's a deeper sensibility or thoughtfulness about what it is he does. I talk to people who work in immigration and customs enforcement and they run the gamut.
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Chapter 6: How does Operation Wetback relate to current deportation plans?
Homan never, to me, showed a particularly deep reckoning with what was at stake, either operationally or in terms of actual human beings and how all of these operations were affecting them.
We talk a lot about guardrails. In other words, the idea is that in the first term, there were institutionalists in key positions at the Pentagon and State Department, and that to the great aggravation of the President of the United States to President Trump, there were guardrails against him going too far. That's one theory of the case.
And now the theory of the case is this time around that there are no guardrails. What effect will that have on this issue?
This is the most striking issue to my mind where we've seen what it looks like as the guardrails start to fall away because we already have evidence of it from the first administration. I think actually DHS, Department of Homeland Security, was a kind of microcosm of some of what we'll see in different federal departments in the second term. And that is.
During Trump's first four years, initially, you had people who would kind of bristle at the idea of lawlessness at the department, who would push back against some of Miller's more outrageous ideas or Trump's particular whims.
But over time, essentially, what you started to see by the end of Trump's first term was people who at least had a kind of fidelity to the department and its agencies fall away, either forced out, you know, resigned out of frustration. And At the time, there was an acting head of the department, the very end, named Chad Wolf, who basically did whatever Miller wanted.
And what that looked like in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was to have DHS agents patrolling domestic protest.
Hmm.
That's genuinely scary stuff that's beyond the pale of DHS activity. And you were already starting to see that. So I think you're going to see everything be more unfettered.
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Chapter 7: What are the realities of undocumented immigrants in America?
That has basically been a kind of rough guideline from one administration to the next and more or less held. I mean there were breaches during the first Trump term. You're going to see stuff like that. You're going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places where in the past you've not seen them before. You know, the aim here being to really create a sense of terror.
That is going to be the modus operandi of the administration. And so, you know, there's a policy involving what's called collateral arrests. If there's a targeted operation and the government is going after a set list of people who they know who are undocumented in the past, there have been. basically regulations against arresting anyone you encounter along the way.
That's going to be out the window. And what that means is there's going to be a much freer reign of racial profiling from agents who don't feel like they have any sense of responsibility. So I think what you're going to see... is workplace raids, which we have been spared because the Biden administration has sort of sworn off of them as the Obama administration did at a certain point.
You're gonna see all of these things come kind of roaring back into the picture. I worry very much about DACA recipients, so people who came here as children, who got a special status during the Obama years and who've moved on and built lives around this status. Trump tried to cancel that policy in his first term and it got tied up in court. That is going to be under assault again.
I do think you're going to see an expansion of detention spaces in the United States. The private prison industry is going to do very well for its shareholders. I think the fact of all this is real. My hesitation in sort of trying to project what it's going to look like is that we get very obsessed with what the numbers might be.
And I think, you know, those numbers are a little bit of a distraction. When Miller talks about deporting a million people, he's pulling that out of thin air. That's not something that he's going to be able to do. But they can cause immense destruction and devastation even trying to reach that goal. And so it's almost immaterial whether or not they reach a million.
If they are able to do what they want to do, they're going to cause a lot of suffering and a lot of upheaval.
Jonathan Blitzer, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
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