VP Harris Outlines the Dangerous Details of Trump’s Signature Policy – Mass Deportation – That He’s Too Scared to Talk About
During remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute's annual leadership conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris described in stark terms the reality of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The New York Times reported the “crowd turned from jovial to silent as the vice president asked them to dig deeper into Mr. Trump’s proposals, which include plans to round up undocumented people on a mass scale and to detain them in camps pending their deportation.”
“We all remember what they did to tear families apart. And now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history,” the vice president said. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How’s that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”
Notably, Vice President Harris did what Trump and his weird running mate, JD Vance, have refused to do: state the devastating details of their own plan. Despite being their signature campaign promise of the 2024 race – who can forget thousands gleefully waving “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs at this past summer’s Republican National Convention? – both men have refused to directly answer questions regarding the specifics.
During his wildly racist and unhinged debate performance against Harris, Trump dodged the moderator’s direct question and “refused to offer any specifics” into his plans, as reported by The New York Times. That is now two debates, two direct questions, and two dodges.
We’ve noted this code of silence is uniform across the GOP ticket, because Vance has also refused to publicly state what they plan to do, dodging Kristen Welker’s questions about family separation not once, not twice, but three times.
However, several recent pieces succinctly capture the brutality, costs, and anti-American nature of this mass deportation agenda.
In their piece for Popular Information, “The stark reality of mass deportation,” Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims write that the mass purging of millions of immigrants would cost taxpayers billions, take a sledgehammer to the economy by kicking out essential workers, tear apart American families, and result in a nationwide “show me your papers” racial profiling campaign that would inevitably ensnare U.S. citizens. Among proposals they note are the mass camps referenced by the vice president:
Once the Trump administration identifies undocumented immigrants, it would need to detain them somewhere before deporting them. Trump has suggested that massive detention centers would need to be built in order to keep up with the number of deportations being processed.
Aside from the economic cost, detention centers have been the sites of numerous human rights abuses. Undocumented immigrants in detention centers have been denied urgent medical care, sexually abused, and kept in chain-link pens.
Crosby and Sims also lay out some important context around recent polling that claims to show some support for mass deportation among the American electorate. While many in the mainstream media focused on a couple of polls finding that a majority of respondents favored mass deportation, a closer examination finds this to be an oversimplification stemming from a lack of understanding of the plan on offer. Support significantly drops when respondents find out the GOP mass deportation plan means targeting the long-settled undocumented community that Americans know as their neighbors, coworkers, and family members.
Reporter Oliver Willis suggested some of the alleged support comes from a common sense understanding that deportations should be targeted at criminals, not our undocumented law-abiding neighbors. “[W]hen american people say they back mass deportation they believe that means ‘the bad people’ who ‘broke the law,’” he writes, “they do not think that means the nice family around the corner who they largely think of as ‘the good ones.’”
The data backs that up. Polling like that from Marquette Law School underscores this point with a test that saw a 16-point drop in support for mass deportation with just very basic details of the plan outlined in the question. Internal polling at America’s Voice found a similar result.
It’s also worth remembering the massive backlash to the Trump administration’s family separation policy, which ripped thousands of wailing children from the arms of asylum-seeking parents. Or looking at the wide sets of data and research, as we have continually highlighted, which show that when given a choice between earned pathways to legal status and mass deportation, the vast majority choose legal pathways – including a significant portion of solidly Republican voters.
This pro-deportation polling tells “less about the actual views of American voters, and more about the overall failure of the media and others to educate citizens on what exactly Trump’s plans for mass deportation entail,” Crosby and Sims write. “The policy is not something that can be summarized in a seven-word poll question. Mass deportations of immigrants would divert law enforcement from critical tasks, cost billions of dollars, break up families, damage the economy, and compromise the nation's values.”
The fact of the matter is that support for legalization has remained high year after year, with Gallup recently finding that 70% of U.S. adults favor legalization of the undocumented community, with 81% of Americans supporting citizenship for Dreamers.
After nearly a decade of Trump at the helm of the Republican Party, it is far from surprising that more of the Republican base has bought into the false and dystopian vision that immigrants are an existential threat that must be purged from neighborhoods and workplaces. It is this Republican base that is overwhelmingly driving the support for mass deportation in the polls. This indicates this is more a story about the radicalization of the Republican Party than an effective agenda for persuasion. In fact, knowledge of the details of the Republican’s mass deportation plan ahead of the election is likely to be one of the best persuasion messages to turn skeptical voters away from Trump.
The data-driven Equis Research, which focuses on the Latino electorate, wrote in their recent guidebook in regards to immigration:
“In the current political environment, the best messaging strategy seems to be to go negative. Use negative messaging to tell voters about Trump’s plans for our immigration system and the way the GOP is ‘playing politics’ with the border. Specifically, calling out Trump’s plans to deport ‘millions of immigrants who have been living and working here for decades’ is an effective persuasion strategy.”
Harris’ effort to ring the alarm bells on Trump’s mass deportation has the rare quality of being vitally important for the national interest while also being good politics. As reporters and scholars have recently noted, this time is different. It isn’t the same campaign bluster that we have seen before. There is a semi-secret plan that Trump and Vance don’t want to talk about, but Trump’s top white nationalist, Stephen Miller has been giddy with the prospect of mass purges that he has detailed the plan to anyone who will listen. And if given the chance, there is a whole cast of characters from the previous Trump administration who have spent the last four years figuring out how to prevent their mass deportation plan from being stymied by the courts or Congress.
In his piece for Talking Points Memo, “Why The Military Is Central To Trump Advisors’ Plans For Mass Deportations,” Josh Kovensky writes about mass detention camp plans and Stephen Miller’s intent to populate them by using the United States’ military against its own people:
For the plan, resources are key. Miller envisioned that a future Trump administration would start identifying and detaining more undocumented immigrants by adding personnel. This force would largely be composed of National Guard units from red states deputized as “immigration enforcement officers,” Miller said, combined with federal law enforcement officers taken from other agencies. From there, Miller continued, the immigration force would identify and detain undocumented immigrants in the states from which the National Guard troopers originated.
“And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby,” Miller said.
Huff Post’s Matt Shuham also laid out the plans in his piece, “Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps,” where he writes that Miller “has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be ‘greater than any national infrastructure project’ in American history.” Shuham notes that Trump has repeatedly cited President Eisenhower’s brutal and deadly mass deportation program, “named after a slur,” as a model. More on the detestable “Operation Wetback”:
Government records detail a militaristic operation using trucks, jeeps and planes. The government conducted naval deportations on cargo ships that a congressional investigation later compared to cramped slave ships — and which led to highly publicized drownings. Law enforcement agencies, from local police up to the federal Border Patrol, pitched in on mass sweeps of industrial areas and immigrant-dense neighborhoods.
Press clippings from the time noted numerous camps were used to house people awaiting deportation. The Los Angeles Times described one such “concentration camp” as “a wire-fenced security camp” capable of holding 1,000 people in Elysian Park. Within a few years, the same area would host Dodger Stadium. Subsequent coverage included a photo of a 10-month-old in her mother’s arms — “youngest internee,” the caption reads — and a 1-year-old American citizen being deported along with his family. Other stories referred to “human freight” being shipped back to Mexico.
“Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump promised last year. Miller doesn’t intend on foiling this plan by repeating the same mistakes that previously blocked his efforts to fully implement his agenda during Trump’s first presidency. It’s just one reason why he’s signed on to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, which in part seeks to purge government employees who have been deemed disloyal to MAGA. Other restraints, like the courts, will no longer be in place, as America’s Voice legal advisor David Leopold previously noted.
“Last time, they came in in 2017 and they thought just throwing out a bunch of Obama rules would allow them to do mass deportation,” Cato Institute’s David Bier told TPM. “Now, they understand that actually, the game is all about resources. The only way to get the resources is from the military. There’s no way they’re getting it from Congress.”
Nor will this authoritarian play be limited to the undocumented community. As Historian Thomas Zimmer recently wrote, “What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about ‘denaturalization’ for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further.” Zimmer goes on to put the mass deportation agenda into a larger recent and historical context warning of the animating ideas behind the agenda that should prompt serious concern:
Such extreme ideas are fully in line with the type of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Right: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. There is an enemy within – the globalist elites, the “woke” ruling class, the radical Left – that is responsible for the assault on the homeland. This enemy is aiding America’s foes abroad, in cahoots with China, and undermining the strength of the nation by “flood(ing) this country with millions of illegal aliens,” as J.D. Vance claimed in his Convention speech. Propagating Great Replacement, all the way down. For the homeland to be made safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too.
This refusal to discuss the details says everything. “If mass deportation was such a popular idea,” we noted at Bluesky, “why have Trump and Vance repeatedly run away from the details of their signature policy issue? Trump has had two debates and got a direct question in each about the details of mass deportation and dodged the question twice. That is quite a tell.”