Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of migrants if he's elected. He wants the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. How Trump plans to do that and its likely consequences.

Guest

Daniel Kanstroom, faculty director of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy, the dean's distinguished scholar and co-director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice.

Also Featured

Chloe East, Associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado - Denver.

Chuck Mills, Resident of Whitewater, Wisconsin.

Transcript

Part I

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [Tape]: The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country. (CHEERS)

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Throughout his 2024 campaign, including at the Republican National Convention, as you just heard, Donald Trump has been pushing his plan to deport millions of migrants out of the United States.

TRUMP: No hope or dream we have for America can succeed unless we stop the illegal immigrant invasion, the worst that's ever been seen anywhere in the world. There's never been an invasion like this anywhere.

CHAKRABARTI: The Department of Homeland Security estimates that as of 2022, 11 million immigrants are in the country illegally. Some have been here for decades. Some have arrived as part of a larger migration pattern seen in recent years. How would 11 million people be gathered up and removed from the country?

Well, Trump plans to authorize workplace raids, rely on U.S. military and National Guard to round up migrants, and engage local law enforcement.

TRUMP: And our local police is going to work with us because they know everything about the people. They know their names. They know everything about them. They know their middle name. They know their numbers.

CHAKRABARTI: Trump has also promised to build new detainment centers. He also says he will end a person's automatic citizenship if they are born in the U.S., a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The Trump mass deportation plan is his absolutist solution to immigration. A longer term, more comprehensive solution could have passed this year. The Senate immigration bill this year had bipartisan support, and it would have appropriated funds for increased border security, streamlining new immigration officers and agents, and allowed Homeland Security to close the border if too many asylum requests were being made.

The bill was, in fact, hailed by some as the first serious effort in a decade to address immigration. Trump reportedly lobbied hard against the bill so that he could campaign on Biden's immigration policies this year. His efforts collapsed any Republican support for the reform and the bill did indeed fade away.

Well, President Biden called out Trump for his role in lobbying against the bill before announcing his own immigration restrictions this summer.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Today, I'm announcing actions to bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum. Migrants will be restricted to receiving asylum at our southern border unless they seek it after entering through an established, lawful process.

CHAKRABARTI: For the first three years of the Biden presidency, there were roughly 2 million illegal border crossings a year. That fell drastically this past year after the Biden administration tightened border controls and significantly limited asylum claims. During the Trump presidency, those numbers remained below a million each year.

Now, Donald Trump's mass deportation plan is supported by his closest advisors, particularly adamant nativists like Stephen Miller. Miller oversaw border policy in the first Trump administration, and he is expected to take up that role again should Trump win the White House again this year. Miller recently spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year.

STEPHEN MILLER: Seal the border; Deport all the illegals.

CHAKRABARTI: Miller went on to identify how he would accomplish those goals.

MILLER: You have your Safe Third agreements, you have Remain in Mexico, finish the wall. You have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens. You do interior repatriation flights to Mexico and not back to the north of Mexico. It's very important. You reimplement Title 42. You have several muscular 212(f)s, that's the travel ban authority. We did a few of those in the Trump administration. You would bring those back and add new ones on top of that.

You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flight. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds. And that's what the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.

And then you also deploy the military to the southern border — not just with a mission to observe, but with an impedance and denial mission. In other words, you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don't have a right to enter into our sovereign territory to even request the asylum claim. The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border and to say no one can cross here at all. (CHEERS)

CHAKRABARTI: Now, just one month ago, Donald Trump put an even finer point on his mass deportation plan. It wouldn't include unauthorized immigrants. He would also suspend refugee resettlement. On September 24, Stephen Miller tweeted, in all caps, "The Trump plan to end the invasion of small town America: Remigration."

Now that word, "remigration," may not be all that familiar in the United States, but in Europe it has a very clear meaning. Austrian far right leader Herbert Kickl has urged remigration while simultaneously declaring the party's manifesto, advocating for "homogeneity" in Austria, and demanding that citizenship for non whites be revoked if they "refuse to integrate."

Other European nativists were ecstatic that Miller and Trump are embracing so-called remigration. Martin Sellner, leader of the so-called Identitarian Movement, tweeted, "Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries. And now the term in the USA!"

Well, let's try to understand more deeply what Trump's mass deportation plan would actually entail and what the true overall goal is. And to do so, I'm joined today by Professor Daniel Kanstroom. He's an immigration law expert at the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy and co-director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice. And author of the book Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History.

Professor Kanstroom, welcome to On Point.

DANIEL KANSTROOM: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we've kind of touched on the Trump plan for mass deportation in broad strokes. But I'd like to hear from you in more detail: How do they propose to actually carry out the purported removal of some 11 million people from the United States?

KANSTROOM: Well, I think there are a number of ways to think about this. And I just want to start with one piece of the public debate that I think has been under discussed, and that is, we need to remember that these are people that we're talking about. These are human beings. They have lives. Many of them have come here due to incredible desperate circumstances or incredible fear. Some have been victims of persecution and torture.

Many of them have now been here for a very long period of time. Many of them have families. So there really is no us and them. It's all of us together. And I would like to foreground the voices and experiences of the people on the move who we're talking about here and not think about them as chess pieces on a board.

So if we do that, then we also can think about it in another way, which is to think about what would this thing look like if it were put into place? And it seems to me that there really is no way to implement this kind of a massive program without creating what amounts to a police state. You're going to have to be checking everybody's I.D.'s. How do you tell who is an immigrant and who is a citizen? People don't come with labels on their foreheads. It's going to be extremely difficult to unweave the fabric of American society in which many people have now been members of this society for — some for shorter periods of time, but many for longer periods of time.

So I think that's a second concern is to think about what is the effect of a program like this on law and society for everybody? And there was a presidential candidate once who talked about this in quite stark terms, and it was not Kamala Harris. It was Thomas Jefferson opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts that Trump is now seeking to resurrect.

Jefferson said, "The friendless alien has been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow." So I think another way to think about this is to ask: What would be the consequences for everybody in a society if you start having massive police actions, detainment camps, separation of families, forced movement of people, extensive prosecutions and so forth?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You know, originally I had planned, Professor, to sort of start at the border and then move inward in terms of how a future Trump administration, should that come to pass, would carry out this plan. But given what you just said, which is very important, let's flip that around.

And you've said, okay, well, in order to sort of unweave the lives of these 11 million people from the United States as a whole, I mean, do you really see that we would have the equivalent of, I don't know, like, checkpoints, or you enter a school building or a post office and you'd have to show your ID in terms of who you are — that this is not outside the realm of possibility?

KANSTROOM: Well, let me say that not only is it not outside the realm of possibility, but some of this already exists. I mean, part of the public debate that's happening about this is making people aware of what is going on. Whereas many immigrants, migrants, non citizens are already acutely aware of it. We already have checkpoints near the southern border.

There are agents who are checking people's IDs on buses in Vermont and New Hampshire. There are police who are making stops and checking people's IDs and calling ICE all around this country.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, they have a right to do that within 100 miles of any U.S. border, which is quite far inland, actually.

KANSTROOM: Correct, correct. And that could expand. And the period of time that a person could be subject to expedited removal, so-called, which is the fast track system could be changed. I mean, I don't want to underestimate the change that the Trump policies would make to existing practice. But I don't — I also don't want to overlook the fact that deportation has been a major part of U.S. law and policy and frankly, about debates over the soul of this country since the very beginning. So this will be a terrible historical episode in my opinion, but it's not completely unprecedented.

CHAKRABARTI: We will come back to that, right? Because there are many times in which it has led to, let's say, darker behavior by the United States government, that's to put it lightly. And I want to come back to that. But in terms of making it real for people now, let's pick Omaha, Nebraska, okay? I actually don't know if there's technically a — if there could be within the 100 mile rule, but let's pick Omaha, Nebraska.

And say your name, your last name happens to be Ruiz, right? But you and your family have been in this country for, I don't know, 200 years. I mean, could a person like that plausibly think that in the future they may want to, I don't know, go to the post office? No, go to the DMV to renew their car registration and suddenly have to prove their citizenship or their legal status in this country?

KANSTROOM: Yes, that could happen. And I think it's going to happen more and more if Trump's vision is implemented. In part because immigration law is incredibly complicated. I spend a year teaching students about how to practice in this field, and even then they need to practice for a few years before they can really conceptualize the whole thing.

So the idea, which Trump has said, and I think Stephen Miller has also said, that we would either deputize people or have the military do it or have state and local police do it, is a terrible idea because we know from other historical episodes that then mistakes often get made. The usual suspects get rounded up.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Kanstroom, let's stick a little bit more with your bringing up the fact that it changes an entire nation. It would change our entire nation, and in fact, our interactions with each other seemingly on a daily basis. Because would it effectively turn us, if not as individual Americans and as organizations, as spies on each other? I mean, how else do you get 11 million people — how else do you accurately identify the immigration status of 11 million people?

KANSTROOM: Well, again, I want to emphasize that I do not think it is possible to accurately identify the immigration status of 11 million people. That's part of the problem. We have a wide variety of statuses. People are often in process or out of process. Some people might have a claim for asylum that's being adjudicated. So it's very hard to figure that out.

And a lot of the Trump plan, the rhetoric, is we're going to go after the "illegal aliens." But non citizens in this country range from people who do not have papers — and that could be sort of the prototypical group that he might be first aiming at — but some of those people have applied for asylum. There are other people who are granted temporary protected status.

There are people who are granted humanitarian parole. There are people on student visas who may have got in some small involvement with the criminal justice system. We've had people who are green card holders for years and years who can be subject to deportation proceedings, often for very minor criminal offenses.

And I think most chilling of all, there's now talk about — and Stephen Miller specifically has said this — much more robust denaturalization programs. So even people who were granted citizenship could be in quite a vulnerable position if all these plans go into place.

So that's the first problem. This needs to be approached much more carefully than any of these plans are doing. And it's inevitable that mistakes are going to be made. And we know this because in any past episode of deportation, upticks in deportation, we have seen U.S. citizens get deported by mistake. And often it's quite a hard thing for their families to even find them. So the range of possible mistakes is almost incalculable. That's the first problem.

The second problem, as you intimated, is even if we could gloss over that, which as I say, I don't think we should. Yes, people are going to be naming names and calling people out. Any little dispute could result in what they used to call dropping a dime. I know nobody uses dimes anymore, but calling ICE on somebody. A marital dispute, a job dispute, anything that happens in criminal court. So the whole society is going to be oriented towards figuring out who is legal and who is not legal.

And as I say, that's a very complicated legal question. And if we start delegating that to people who are calling ICE or to ICE agents or to deputized deportation officers, it's a formula for what amounts to a police state for everybody. And especially for people who might, and I want to say this very carefully, who might look like an immigrant. And I think there is a sense in which the Trump administration thinks they know who looks like an immigrant or who looks like an undocumented migrant. That's a formula for racial disparities in enforcement, ethnic cleansing, and so forth. And that's another great danger to this program.

CHAKRABARTI: Can we talk in more detail about the phrase you just used, ethnic cleansing. That links us back to this sort of bubbling up of this phrase remigration, that Stephen Miller is so proudly tweeting about and talking about. In the European context, is that essentially what it means? The removal of non white, or the desire to remove non white Europeans from the European continent?

KANSTROOM: Yeah. Among the right wing parties in Europe, that's a common trope. And of course, the debates in Europe are somewhat different in terms of historical patterns and in terms of anxiety about Islam in particular. But yes, that is what he's talking about.

And of course they — by which I mean Miller and others in the Trump administration — have been in close contact with Orban in Hungary and other authoritarian leaders to get ideas and practices and slogans and so forth. So that's correct.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is a very knowing and deliberate use of that term.

KANSTROOM: Absolutely. And what does it play to? I mean, on one hand, people can differ and I do think reasonable minds can differ about whether we should have a more robust border policy and whether, you know, complying perfectly with the law or not complying with the law should have consequences. I think we can and should have a discussion about that.

It's going to be a complicated discussion. It's going to involve nuance. It's going to involve questions of what is the appropriate remedy for a violation of law? Should time count? Should there be a statute of limitations? Should a person's family connections count? All those things. But they don't want to have that conversation.

And so they want to use this idea of "they broke the law, period." But actually what is really going on here has very disturbing racial undertones and ethnic undertones. And that has always been true in the United States. That was true in 1798. If you read the debates about the Alien and Sedition Acts, they weren't only concerned about the French, which was a main focus, but they were concerned about Black people coming from Haiti — and it was not called Haiti yet — but from the islands.

And there was always this underlying racial anxiety to these kinds of movements: through that period, through the Chinese period, the first deportation laws were aimed specifically at Chinese workers and up through the Eisenhower "Operation Wetback." I hate to even say the name, but that's what it was called. And that's the model that Trump and Miller are building on. These were all ethnically focused actions.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I want to actually go over that history in more detail because it's important. But in order to do that, I know for a fact already, professor, that there are people listening to this conversation right now saying this is Trump derangement syndrome, right? That this is just hysterics, that there's no way that a new Trump administration would eliminate birthright citizenship. It wouldn't denaturalize people. It wouldn't, you know, create a secret police amongst us all to remove our neighbors. They just don't believe it because we're in the middle of an election cycle and politicians say things to get elected.

Now, the reason why I am certain of this is because just last week, I was in Wisconsin. And I had this fascinating conversation with a gentleman named Chuck Mills. He owns an auto body and towing shop in Whitewater, Wisconsin. And just as background, Whitewater over the past couple of years has seen the influx of about 1,000 migrants in a town of 15,000 people. They're there for, there's a lot of work that's needed to be done with local businesses and particularly farms around the town.

And initially, Mr. Mills was very, very opposed to the arrival of these migrants. But over time, he's come to welcome them. He shares a faith with them. He finds them to be excellent neighbors. They are law abiding members of the town. He's very much in support of — they're largely Nicaraguan — these new Nicaraguan, fellow residents of his in Whitewater.

So we had a long conversation about that evolution in his mind. And then near the end of it, I finally just asked him about this current election. And here's that exchange.

CHAKRABARTI [Tape]: Do you mind if I ask you if you know who you're going to vote for in the presidential?

CHUCK MILLS: Oh, you know it's President Trump. (LAUGHS) I'm very conservative and not shy about it. But I'm also fair. So.

CHAKRABARTI: He's the one who's talking about that they're all criminals.

MILLS: He's a politician now. He wasn't always. He wasn't always hated. But he's a politician. He has to win. He can't do the job if he doesn't win. So, he's going to have to sling some stuff out there and turn some votes. He's got to grab these conservatives, as well as other people.

And he's going to use fear, just like the left. I mean, they got us fearing everything, you know, or they want you to. You know, 'If you get these people in, they're going to just send everybody back.' Well, Trump was already in once. He didn't send anybody back except MS-13 murderers, rapists. And you were there, right? You were there. Did he send any families back? Were they going door to door? No. And he's not going to again.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Kanstroom, my senior editor, Dorey Scheimer, was also with me in Wisconsin and she wanted to put a little bit finer point on what the Trump plan really is. So here's what she said.

DOREY SCHEIMER [Tape]: President Trump has said on the trail a couple of times this week that he has a plan to deport about 13 million people, which would include anybody who's come here over the past couple of years. If that were to happen, I mean, would that be a big loss to this town?

MILLS: It's never going to happen. I told you, he's got to win. He's gotta win the presidency. So he's gotta throw it out there. He's gotta say what people want to hear so that they'll vote for him. Once he's in there, he's going to do the same job he always did. He didn't mess us around last time. I mean, they talk a bunch of malarkey. But there's no real consequences to anything he did other than positive. I couldn't find one negative thing.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Chuck Mills, resident of Whitewater, Wisconsin. So Professor Kanstroom, he's not the only one who thinks that. That, in fact, the Trump mass deportation plan is deliberately outlandish for purely election cycle reasons. And that this conversation is hooey, quite frankly. What would you say to that?

KANSTROOM: I would say that it is quite possible, certainly extremely possible that Trump is using this rhetoric for political purposes. However, I don't agree that the last time nothing bad happened. Many plans were put into place. And families were separated at the border.

We still have children who were lost in the system during the episode of family separation during the first Trump administration, children who were separated from their parents. And there were many other things that happened during the so-called Muslim ban period when people were separated and excluded from the country.

A lot of what prevented Trump from implementing a lot of those really harsh plans last time was vigorous legal action and activist organizing, much of which I think is going to face a much more sophisticated array of programs this time around. I think this program has been thought through quite carefully. I think Stephen Miller is certainly committed to it. He's not enunciating this for political purposes to win elections. And also those political purposes are not going to go away after the election. There's still a sense if they think this is a winning issue and if they think that removing people from these communities will play well in certain key areas, they will certainly do it.

And again, were there not precedents for this in U.S. history, I might say, yeah, people talk about this all the time, but it never happens. But it does happen. And it has happened, and it's happened in other constitutional democracies. And this time around, I say, believe them when they say it because they mean it.

And now, for that gentleman, I would also say, look around you and think about what the actual effect on your community will be. You need a lot of workers. Our economy needs people. We need young people coming into this country. So maybe we could think about a way to approach this subject with a little more care and a little less, you know, overriding of the consequences for all of us together.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. So it has happened. Let's talk more about that. 1954, for people who don't remember, or don't even know, weren't alive at that time.

KANSTROOM: Yeah, I wasn't alive. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Me neither. (LAUGHS) What happened? There was a mass deportation plan enacted upon by the United States.

KANSTROOM: Yeah, I mean, this was during the Eisenhower administration. I will say one of the early proposals was to use the military, but Eisenhower in what I think was his wisdom decided that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act and so did not use the military.

But it was a mass deportation of almost entirely Mexicans. And what was tricky about this is that these were Mexicans who had been recruited to come into the country, into Texas and California. There was a lot of complexity in a previous program that was called the Bracero program that had brought in Mexican workers. And a lot of the big businesses in Texas and California really needed those workers. But as the tide began to turn and the economy looked a little different and the politics began to turn, there became an upswell of calls to remove a lot of the people.

And you ended up removing — I mean, there's some debate about what the actual numbers were. The government says the numbers were about one million people. And that was primarily in one area of the country. Others say it might have been slightly fewer people because some people might have been removed more than once. But it was a massive operation. There was incredible hardship. There were many mistakes that were made. And that was just a tenth or less than a tenth of what they're talking about doing now. And that was only focused on undocumented people without papers who were relatively easy to figure out where they were because most of them were working in particular areas for particular businesses.

The other thing I would say about this is that people have the feeling, people who support these deportation episodes, that it's like one and done. You know, that you do that and then that's the end of the problem. But you still have recruitment of workers coming back into this country, so the United States is sending an incredible mixed message to the world.

We need the labor. The inflation that everybody is talking about would have been so much worse if we didn't have immigrants working in this country. And there are a number of other, you know, economic aspects of this that are worth talking about. That's not going to go away and the border can never be perfectly sealed.

And as long as you're recruiting people and you have ways to get in, you know, they used to say you build a 50-foot wall and somebody will come along with a 51-foot ladder. I mean, many of these people are desperate. They will come by water. They will come through Canada. They'll come in different ways. We need a system that recognizes the reality of the world.

And there are programs that one can envision — not deportation programs — that could get a better handle on this. I'm not saying that that everything that was done in the previous administration was perfect. I'm not saying that at all. I think there were a lot of mistakes and again to that gentleman who you recorded, I would say I understand where a lot of this anxiety is coming from. There is a feeling of this being an out of control situation. But control doesn't doesn't necessarily mean massive deportations.

CHAKRABARTI: Just for clarity's sake though: Are you opposed, full stop, to deportation as a tool for immigration control or migration control in the United States?

KANSTROOM: Personally, I'm not actually opposed to that. But I think that, since you mentioned Europe, I will say that, under European law, unlike under U.S. law, there are guideposts to deportation. There are guideposts of what are called proportionality.

So if a person is subject to deportation, they get to go before a judge and state their case. And the judge will say, "Tell me how long you've been here. Tell me what family you've had. Tell me how much you violated the immigration laws. Tell me what good you've done. Tell me what job you've done." And then there's a balancing. Which is what we do in law, which is what we do if somebody is accused of a crime. We don't just say, if you litter, you get the death penalty.

So, there are ways of using deportation. My own personal opinion is that it is most legitimate as to people who have only been here for a very short period of time, and who are apprehended near the border, and who are not desperate, and is least legitimate when you're talking about long term residents who are being deported for minor offenses or because their papers are not in order.

CHAKRABARTI: Point taken. But quickly before we have to take our next break, I mean, you used a quite stark analogy just there about you litter, you get the death penalty, but that's not how many people see it at all. They see it as, well, it's a reasonable response to an unauthorized presence of someone on sovereign U.S. territory. They have not been allowed in or approved to come into the United States by the government. So why not just send them back?

KANSTROOM: Well, first of all, because they have been, in many cases, invited to come in by U.S. companies and employers. Second of all, because there are long historical patterns of people crossing these borders of which migrants are acutely aware. So those are two of the reasons, and there are a couple of others I can talk about after the break.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Daniel Kanstroom is with us. And I wanted to let you pick up your thought about the use of deportation as a tool. And let me just add a little finer point to why many people think there is nothing wrong with even just the, again, the concept of this mass deportation plan. Because I think that's sort of what it means to be a nation is what Donald Trump is keying into when he says, well, if you can't do this, then you don't have a country, right?

Or we played that tape from Stephen Miller earlier who says, "you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don't have a right to enter into our sovereign territory," to even request an asylum claim. So go ahead and pick up your thought.

KANSTROOM: Well, I just think that's a simplistic way of thinking about it. I accept the proposition that a nation-state has a right to have a sovereign border. The question is: What do you do about reality on the ground when you have people who move?

So, for example, you could just say, "We have a sovereign border, and if you cross that border, you get deported, period." Okay. What if you crossed the border when you were two years old and you were fleeing a war or you were fleeing your parents were being targeted by a guerrilla group and they feared death? So you've been in this country now, let's imagine you're 27 years old. You've been here since you were two. You crossed the border as a child. Does that mean that in order to vindicate this idea of a sovereign nation, we have to deport that 27-year-old because she entered the country when she was two? In desperate circumstances? I don't think so.

I think part of what's challenging about immigration law is that it requires the legal system to be more nuanced and to be more careful in making these judgments. And the law does do that. Actually, U.S. immigration law is much more complicated than Trump and Miller would have you think. So the question is not should there be a consequence for violating the law of the border? The question is what should that consequence be? And how much are we willing to spend in order to erect a machinery of government to implement that law?

And these are the same questions that we raise in other issues of complicated social policy. I mean, people violate speeding laws all the time. Do you want to have cameras on every highway and have an automatic ticket system? And should those tickets be $1 million if you violate the speeding law? Probably not. Well, it's the same kind of a conversation. I'm saying we can't think about these things in black and white or binary terms. It's more complicated than that.

CHAKRABARTI: But as you know, Trump and members of his advising circle, they would go so far as to say that they wouldn't even have to use the machinery of government to fully enact the deportation of 11 to 13 million people. That the hope is, we've heard this term before, "self deportation."

I mean, I was reading a really interesting article in The New Yorker. They quote Jason Hauser, who served as a senior official in ICE in the Biden administration, in fact. And last summer, Hauser tried to sort of logistically map out what a mass deportation program would look like if Trump enacted it. And he came to the conclusion that, essentially, people would become so afraid if ICE or the police or the United States military were were weaponized in this deportation scheme, that people would just leave. I mean, he said it'll be, "Boys and girls in your kids' classes at school who just stop showing up."

KANSTROOM: Well, I don't want to underestimate the cynical cruelty of that kind of a program. But let's bracket that for the moment, because I do think it's both cynical and cruel. But I think it's also nonsense. And it's pernicious nonsense.

And I'll tell you how I know this. Because I've spent my life interviewing, working with, working beside and representing non-citizens from many parts of the world. And I often have said to them, in fact, I remember doing research in Guatemala some years ago and asking people, "What if you were facing federal prison in the United States? Would you not cross the border? What if you were facing like, you couldn't get a driver's license or you couldn't get your kids in school?" What if, what if, what if?

And the answer I always got from people was, "You have no idea how desperate our situation is." People don't typically up and leave their country unless they have a very compelling reason to do so. And they're not going to voluntarily go back simply because you try to make their lives more miserable here. Now, again, I think there are other good reasons not to try to make people's lives miserable, but I think, in general, that's a fantasy. If you actually think those kind of policies are going to work, they are not going to work.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, before we get back to sort of the larger implications for the United States in general, I do want to just quickly go over with you the sort of legal framework for some of the things, specific things that Trump and Miller have proposed.

Again, we heard him earlier say, well, you not just deputize the National Guard, but relocate the United States military to the border. He called it — what did he call it? An "impedance and denial mission." Because he asserts, Miller asserts, the military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border and say, "No one can cross here at all." Is that legally true?

KANSTROOM: I don't think so. I think that would certainly be challenged and I think the challenge would have strength to it. I think the challenge would become even greater and probably would have a much greater chance of success if they deployed the military within the United States as deportation agents. There I do think you face the Posse Comitatus Act.

And I think a lot of people, even people who don't support immigrant rights, are not going to be enthusiastic about having military checkpoints in our major cities checking people's papers. So that, I think, is legally very questionable.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then what about the practicalities of using ICE, for example, whose, you know, whose entire reason for being is border security? I understand that ICE only has, what, 6,000 deportation officers nationwide? So how much would that agency have to be ramped up in order to help fulfill this mission?

KANSTROOM: Well, quite a lot. But a lot of the programs they're talking about would actually be implemented by a different agency, which is Customs and Border Protection, CBP.

Because if you're talking about expedited removal cases or cases at or near the border, which I think probably they're envisioning as the "low-hanging fruit" that they might go after first, they'd probably use CBP. They don't have the resources to do anything like this. And in fact, the bill, the Lankford bill, the Biden proposal that you mentioned at the introduction had a lot of funding in it for just those kinds of things, but that didn't pass the Congress.

So I don't know where they think this money is going to come from. Are they going to take it from FEMA? You know, I don't know where it's going to come from. So that's going to be a problem. They don't have the resources to implement a plan like this. However, there are a large number of people — and I hate to say this because some people may not be aware of it — but people who were recently granted humanitarian parole or temporary protected status are already in the system. So it is true that they could be relatively easily located and at least sent notices to show up for deportation hearings. I think that that's probably a first step that the administration would take.

With ICE, you're talking about going after people who've been here for longer periods of time. And then there are due process requirements in the courts. Again, everything is subject to change if they can get a majority in the Congress to do it. But as the law stands now, that would be quite a bit more difficult.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Miller also said in that quote that we played earlier, "You would establish a large scale staging ground for removal flight. You grab immigrants, and then you move them to these staging grounds, and then that's what the planes would be waiting for."

I mean, he's talking about what, mass camps, essentially?

KANSTROOM: Yeah. And that could be done. And that has been done.

CHAKRABARTI: It has been done?

KANSTROOM: In the past. Many times in the past. So that is totally thinkable, doable, probably legal, depending upon the population who's subject to it. But if you're talking about expedited removal flights and so forth, yeah, the government could do that.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, you said one thing earlier, and I want to just, again, historical clarification here. You said that Trump is using the desire to bring back the Alien and Sedition Act in order to find a legal foundation for this mass deportation plan. Remind us what that act is, actually.

KANSTROOM: Quite fascinating. 1798, just about a decade after the Constitution goes into effect, there suddenly becomes this dispute in this country between one branch of the founding generation, the John Adams, New England Federalist branch, and another branch, the Thomas Jefferson, James Madison branch. And a lot of this centers on feelings about the French Revolution. And feelings about who was a proper American and who was an "agent of sedition," as they call them.

And so they passed a set of, actually four laws, only one of which is still in effect. But the first one was called the Alien Friends Act. And that gave the president the authority to round up and basically designate anybody who he deemed dangerous to the peace and security of the United States for deportation. That law actually is not in effect anymore. And part of the reason for that is that Thomas Jefferson won the next election and he got a lot of votes from Irish immigrants and other immigrants, you know, who would become citizens.

But the act that still is on the books is called the Alien Enemies Act, and this is the one that Trump wants to use.

The problem he's going to face with that is that that seems to require, the language is a little bit unclear, but it requires war. It allows the government to round up alien enemies during a time of war. He says there's another provision in there that if there's a predatory invasion, and he says that could be like drug cartels, he could invoke the Alien Enemies Act and round up drug dealers or something like that. That case would definitely go to the Supreme Court and I think he's on shaky constitutional ground.

CHAKRABARTI: And of course we have seen Americans get rounded up during wartime before with the Japanese internment, Japanese-American internment camps.

KANSTROOM: And that was using that law and heirs to that law.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes.

KANSTROOM: During the Roosevelt administration. But that was a war.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So, underlying a lot of this is, you said earlier that that these 11 million people, people I underscore, are very much intertwined into American life. And you've said repeatedly, in large part because their labor is needed in the United States.

So we spoke with Chloe East, who's a professor of economics at the University of Denver (sic). And she studies immigration policy and the impact of deportation on the U.S. economy.

CHLOE EAST: Mass deportations would likely have a large negative effect on the U.S. economy.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor East says that that perspective is supported by research into large-scale deportations that we've been talking about from the 1930's up through the Obama administration.

EAST: We see that the number of people who are working in the U.S. goes down. And this is both due to the direct physical removals of non-U.S. citizens from the U. S., but also due to the fact that we don't see U.S.-born people simply slotting into the jobs left behind by people who are deported. Instead, what we see is that nobody's willing to take those jobs, partly because they're less attractive to U.S.-born workers for a variety of reasons: because they're lower paid, because they're dangerous.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, East also says there are clear examples of specifically how this would work.

EAST: So when we engage in a mass deportation effort, it's much harder to find construction laborers and dishwashers because those are jobs much more likely taken by undocumented immigrants. And when people have a hard time finding workers for those jobs, it makes it harder to continue operating their business as usual. And that reduces demand for other jobs that are more likely taken by U.S.-born workers, so think construction site managers and servers at a restaurant.

CHAKRABARTI: And Professor East also says there's a notable effect that the mass deportation would have on U.S.-born workers as well.

EAST: My research has found that for every half a million people who are removed from the U.S. labor market as a result of mass deportations, that leads to 44,000 fewer U.S.-born people that are employed. And so in terms of people's lived experience, we would expect it to be harder to find a job for U.S.-born workers and that some U.S.-born workers might be laid off. And this is not a temporary effect. It seems to persist over time.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Chloe East, a professor of economics at the University of Denver (sic). And she also told us that recent studies place the cost of deporting one person at between $13,000 to $15,000. And Trump's proposal has been estimated as potentially costing at least $315 billion to execute over time.

Professor Kanstroom, we've just got two minutes left here, and I'm wondering how we should move forward thinking about this. Because the reason why Donald Trump, one of the main reasons why he won election in 2016, and why he has continued to, you know, even deepen and advance his focus on immigration is A, because it is an unsolved challenge in the United States and B, because it has touched a nerve in this country. So do you, I mean, given your long study of deportation and immigration, do you find, is there any kind of plausible middle ground given the political heat, but also the practical realities of this issue right now?

KANSTROOM: Of course there's a middle ground. And what's tricky about this is that the Trump position is deceptively simple. And the argument opposed to it is always a little bit more complicated and it involves a number of steps. But I think it starts from the question of what kind of a nation-state are we? We are not an ethnic or religious or racial nation state.

Now, the phrase "nation of immigrants" is very complicated and one can debate settler colonialism and the rights of indigenous people, I think those are very important caveats when you throw out the idea of a nation of immigrants.

But if you were to say to people: Do we want to have a nation-state that is grounded in ideas of cultural pluralism, diversity, energy, and enthusiasm, younger people coming in and joining an enterprise that they feel really strongly about? Isn't that the kind of country we want? Or do we want a country that is older, more homogenous, with very high inflation and, you know, all the consequences of the alternative, leaving aside the question of a police state? So I think you have to frame it in terms of being more affirmative about what immigration adds.

Now, when you talk about undocumented immigration, it is a problem, as I said. And I don't want to — I teach law. I mean, I understand the role of law. And even when you talk about economics, it's complicated because a lot of the workers are exploited. And that can have economic benefit for other people. But I think we have to engage with this in terms of what kind of a nation state do we want to be.

CHAKRABARTI: So Miller and the like would say the soul of the nation is at stake. But tell me once again that quote that you told us from Thomas Jefferson about the soul of the nation?

KANSTROOM: He said, "The friendless alien is selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow."

CHAKRABARTI: Daniel Kanstroom, director of the Rappaport Center of Law and Public Policy and co-director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice and author of Deportation Nation and Aftermath as well. Professor Kanstroom, thank you so much.

KANSTROOM: Thank you.