Trump’s mass deportation plans are a racist racket with deep roots in U.S. history and law.
By Alberto Toscano, In These Times
“They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” So said Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s recently named “border czar,” at last July’s National Conservatism conference, where Homan announced that, should Trump return to the White House, he would run “the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”
A few months earlier, Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff and chief anti-migrant agitator, laid out his own dark vision for “the most spectacular migration crackdown”: enlisting the full range of federal powers for a mass deportation campaign that would overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers and any efforts to shield undocumented workers from surveillance, incarceration and expulsion.
Now, less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the threats against municipal or state officials willing to extend “sanctuary” have only grown more explicit, as when Homan recently vowed to prosecute Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson if he continues to “harbor and conceal” asylum seekers.
Trump’s mass deportation plans are alarming but they are also a conscious (if turbocharged) recap of the United States’ long history of anti-migrant state racism, as well as the product of a very profitable system of detention and surveillance supported by successive administrations of both major parties.
Whether they take the “spectacular” form Miller seeks, they will pay dividends in multiple ways: enabling further profiteering by private prison and other carceral corporations tapped to manage the coming crackdown, while permitting Trump to profit politically from the claim that migrants are the prime culprits of “American carnage.” That this strategy knows no moral or factual limits was evident in the MAGA response to the recent violence in New Orleans and Las Vegas — declaring “We need to secure that border” even as both attacks were perpetrated by native-born U.S. citizens with lengthy military backgrounds.
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