5 Key Facts on the GOP’s Signature Issue: Mass Deportation

Trump and Project 2025’s plan to rip apart American families and wreck the economy

As the placards and party platform at that Republican convention made abundantly clear for any remaining doubters, mass deportation is the signature issue for the GOP in 2024. Donald Trump and JD Vance appeared in a joint interview on Fox News the Tuesday following the Republican National Convention, where they again reinforced their plan to deport mothers as part of their massive family separation plan. 

They have the commitment, a detailed plan, and little in the way of impediments from carrying out the plan if they win in November. 

Project 2025 lays out the mechanisms for enacting this mass deportation agenda and the leading members of the coalition are enthusiasts waiting in the wings to enact the plan. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025, stated on MSNBC that “we need to have the biggest mass deportation system ever in the history of America.” That view has also been echoed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

So far there have been zero prominent Republicans who have come out in opposition to their party’s campaign promise.

Despite being the Republicans’ signature issue, they have been less than forthcoming with the details of what this massive and cruel undertaking would involve and the impacts it would have on every aspect of our nation. Their plan is not just for new arrivals, but the creation of a nationwide show-me-your-papers-force to round up the people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have U.S. citizen children, and have built homes, businesses, and lives here. As we wrote a couple weeks ago, mass deportation is a kitchen table issue.

We outline below some of the destructive impacts of mass deportation, and highly recommend reading:

• Radley Balko’s Substack post, “Trump’s Deportation Army”,

• as well as Andrea Pitzer’s recent article in Scientific American, “Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History.”

These details are crucially important. Some key facts on who and how the country will be impacted. 

Families:

Mass deportation is mass family separation. There are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. But, as Eisenhower’s mass deportation showed, even U.S. citizens are at risk. Millions of immigrants live in mixed-status families. One estimate found that 4.4 million US citizen children could be affected by the mass deportation plan.  

Recession, inflation, and massive job loss will hit the kitchen table hard for working families all across the country. But there would be a stark hole in the homes of those immigrants who are taken away. There will be empty seats at kitchen tables. There will be a loss of paychecks. There will be a loss of family. Kids will come from school to homes without their parents. Businesses would lose workers, some would just shutter. Crops would rot in the fields.  

Communities:

Reports indicate that one aspect of the plan would be to send National Guard troops, the military and local police to conduct raids in communities around the country. Project 2025 calls for removing prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’, thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions, as well as at protests. The plan also calls for returning to a style of dragnet raids that the ACLU criticized for its racist and abusive tactics. 

In one example from 2018, American children were left without their parents after a mass workplace raid targeted a meatpacking plant in Tennessee. “A hundred and sixty children in the area, all U.S. citizens, had a parent arrested in the Bean Station raid,” The New Yorker said. Hundreds of other children in the heavily-Latino region stayed home from school the following day, leaving community members to try to repair the lingering trauma of the workplace sweep and separations. The mass deportation agenda promises to make the scene in Tennessee a regular affair across the nation.

Economy:

In a Washington Monthly column, “Trump’s Plans for Mass Deportation Would Be an Economic Disaster,” Robert Shapiro, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, focused on the economic catastrophe Trump’s plans would inflict on all Americans. “For example, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have deep ties to their communities and the country, with 79 percent having lived here for at least 12 years and 44 percent for 20 to 40 years,” wrote Shapiro. “Some also work for businesses, which is the equivalent of 4.5 percent of all employment today. Removing them from the workforce could, at once, bring on a recession while reigniting inflation.”

Key industries:

Agriculture, construction, home care, food service, among other industries, will be devastated by mass deportation. Immigrants, both undocumented and those with some protections like TPS, are deeply ingrained immigrants. That includes at least one million farm workers, more than 205,000 food production workers and 1.6 million workers in the construction industry and an estimated 142,000 undocumented immigrants who work as childcare workers, personal care, and home health workers. All of these people would be targets for mass deportation. States like Alabama have already shown the devastating effects of anti-immigrant policy on industries. Immigrant workers fled the state following the passage of 2011’s H.B. 56, resulting in headlines like “Alabama immigration: crops rot as workers vanish to avoid crackdown.” 

Polling:

Looking at polls gives us an indication of why the masterminds of the mass deportation agenda don’t share details. While many in the media focused on a June CBS/YouGov poll that asked adults if they favored a “national deportation program,” where 62% were in favor, while 38% were opposed. But, in a May 2024 poll of registered voters, Marquette University asked about mass deportation. Half of the respondents were asked, “Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries?” 64% favored while 36% were opposed. The other half of respondents were asked, “Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?” (The emphasis is our own.) With that additional information, support shifted dramatically, with 52% opposed to deportations and 48% in favor. That is a 16-point shift with just the basics of the plan included. There are more details, many noted above, that need to be explained to the American people.

Meanwhile, support for legalization remains high. Gallup recently found 70% of U.S. adults favor legalization of the undocumented community with 81% of Americans supporting citizenship for Dreamers. During the GOP primaries, exit polls gave Republican voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina a choice: did they support legalization or deportation. In South Carolina exit polling, the vast majority of Nikki Haley’s voters, 70%, chose legal status. While most Trump voters expressed pro-mass deportation sentiments, 29% joined Haley voters in saying they support a path to legalization. This number closely mirrored the results we saw in New Hampshire, where 68% of Haley voters favored legal status. 

One other indication of the vulnerability of mass deportation is that despite spending the presidential debate dehumanizing and attacking immigrants, Trump dodged the direct question on mass purging. The Harris campaign also has been picking up and throwing the mass deportation pledge back at the Trump campaign