Donald Trump vowed to deport “all” illegal immigrants, with violent criminals as only his first priority, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press which aired on Sunday.
The president-elect gave his clearest outline yet for his proposed mass deportation plan in the interview, telling moderator Kristen Welker that “you have to do it. It’s a very tough thing to do” when asked directly if he would “deport everyone who is here illegally over the next four years?”.
But he would also target birthright citizenship — the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of citizenship to any person born in the United States or its territory around the world.
“[W]e're going to have to get it changed,” Trump said of the 14th amendment. “We'll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”
“We’re starting with the criminals, and we got to do it. And then we’re starting with others, and we’re going to see how it goes,” he added. Of the word “others”, he clarified: “Others are other people outside of criminals.”
He quickly pivoted in the interview to a more comfortable talking point: claiming that immigration would be allowed to continue, while the US government would work to prevent criminals being among those entering the country.
“We don’t want people who are in for murder,” Trump said. “They’re walking down the streets, they’re walking next to you and your family.”
He claimed that “estimates” said that thousands of convicted murderers were walking US streets, having come to the country illegally.
Actual data from the Department of Homeland Security indicates that the total number of US Border Patrol interactions with noncitizens convicted of homicide or manslaughter is typically less than 50 per year.
But Trump’s ambitious goal to deport all noncitizens living in the US without legal means would put a drastically larger number of targets on the backs of people living all around the country.
An estimated 11 million undocumented (”illegal”) immigrants are thought to live across the United States, according to the most recent figures from 2022. An operation to deport that many people in just four years — or even eight, if a Republican president were to continue Trump’s work in 2028 — would be a staggering undertaking that would have rippling effects in communities in every state.
It would also require a massive expansion of existing DHS infrastructure, which at present is not equipped to process or deport anywhere close to the number of people Trump hopes to go after.
Trump himself has said that he believes the real number of undocumented noncitizens living in the US to be between 15-20 million people, which is subsequently his actual target for the mass deportation plan.
Democrats, who once pushed forcefully for immigration reform that would allow immigrants living in the US illegally to pursue a pathway to full citizenship, have largely backed away from those efforts. Kamala Harris’s campaign attacked Trump for torpedoing a bill that would have allowed the president to shut down the asylum system altogether during the 2024 presidential election.
The incoming president has picked hardliner Tom Homan as his “border czar” while also putting Stephen Miller, the architect of his first-term family separation border enforcement measures, in charge of advising him on national security issues at the White House.
