President Donald Trump has wasted little time since returning to the White House carrying through on his vows to stop certain immigrants from coming to the United States and to remove many who are here. Over the past months, Capital & Main has explored and reported on migrants and asylum seekers who’ve been detained at the border, examining their fate and the rules that keep them in custody. This is the second in a two-part series looking at the history of mass deportations in the United States and what it portends for the future.
When Rodriguez has an upcoming appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sometimes his daughter’s grades slip.
The stress of not knowing whether ICE will let him stay in the United States has already sent two of his children to therapy, Rordriguez said.
“They know that when I go to the ICE appointments, we don’t know if I’ll come back,” Rodriguez said in Spanish.
The Guatemalan man, who asked not to be fully identified out of fear of retaliation, has already been deported once, and he’s been held in ICE custody a few times. Though Rodriguez already has a deportation order and officials could send him back at any time, his attorney has managed to convince the U.S. government to let him stay in the country for now as long as he checks in periodically.
That could change under President Donald Trump, who has already launched efforts to follow through on his campaign promise of mass deportations of immigrants.
That promise has raised concerns among economists as well as human rights advocates based on the effects of large-scale deportations in the past.
The Trump administration has floated ideas that include building temporary detention tent facilities where the government can hold people while it fast tracks their cases as well as using military and local law enforcement to assist immigration officials. The team has already indicated it’s considering invoking the same law that the government used to round up and detain Japanese Americans during World War II — a moment in U.S. history the government later apologized for and is now widely criticized as racist and xenophobic.
Erin Tsurumoto Grassi, whose grandparents were children when they were forced out of their homes under a notorious executive order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said Trump’s plans will continue that legacy.
“It’s part of a much larger existing problem in this country that ties back to white supremacy,” she said. “What happened to my family is not necessarily unique when you look at the history of this country, when you look at the things that have been done to people of color in this country.”
Adam Isacson of the human rights advocacy organization the Washington Office on Latin America said that he expects the Trump team to try new, legally creative strategies this time around to bring about the promised deportations.
“Who had read the quarantine statutes of the 1940s of the U.S. code as a way to exclude almost 3 million people?” Isacson said, referring to a policy known as Title 42 introduced by Trump in 2020 as a way to block asylum seekers at the border. “I had never heard of it, but Stephen Miller had.”
Still, people like Rodriguez, who have already been ordered removed, are likely to be targeted for arrest in the coming days as ICE officers work to meet newly established quotas. In several cases during Trump’s first term in office, people with such orders sought protection from deportation by living in churches.
“The only thing that makes us different from other people is that we don’t have status, but with everything else we’re the same,” Rodriguez said. “We want our children to do well.”
Planning a Mass Deportation
To deport the number of people that Trump has discussed, the administration will have to figure out how to streamline the deportation process, which often drags out in lengthy court proceedings and then in the logistical hurdles of getting a country to agree to take someone back. In his first term, Trump deported more than 900,000 people, according to ICE data. That’s fewer than former President Barack Obama deported in either of his terms.
“The process of deporting someone — I think their only restraint is resources,” Isacson said.
Trump has declared a national emergency and ordered the Department of Defense to deploy military troops to assist with immigration enforcement.
Incoming administration official Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, has called the military a “force multiplier” for immigration enforcement efforts.
The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from participating directly in civilian law enforcement, but troops could provide logistical support from construction to monitoring. For example, every president since George W. Bush has deployed National Guard troops to do logistical work at the border, including to reinforce barriers or monitor Border Patrol camera feeds. Military planes are also now conducting deportation flights.
Project 2025, the conservative policy plan by the Heritage Foundation that several of Trump’s early appointees helped write, calls for changing detention standards to allow ICE to hold people in tents. The state of Texas has already offered 1,400 acres of ranchland for the administration to build additional detention facilities. Under the first Trump administration, the military participated in building the border wall, and it could be called in to help with this construction as well.
As Project 2025 suggested, ICE has already removed restrictions on officers’ ability to conduct immigration arrests in places like schools, religious buildings, hospitals and emergency shelters such as those used during the Los Angeles fires.
And, in keeping with Project 2025’s plans, Trump’s Day One executive orders included instructions for an expansion of a program called expedited removal, which allows immigration officials to issue a deportation order without going before a judge. Historically, the program applied only to people who just crossed the border, but in his first term, Trump attempted to expand it to include anyone who had been in the United States for less than two years. Initially stalled in court, the change was eventually allowed though later rescinded under former President Joe Biden.
“I think their hope is that there is some legal device or set of legal devices that can kind of do for them in the interior what Title 42 did for them on the border and allow them to sidestep the immigration laws in whole or in part,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project.
He noted that requiring hearings before a judge to secure a deportation order helps protect people’s due process rights.
“It’s not complicated for the sake of being complicated,” Jadwat said.
The ACLU has already filed a lawsuit to challenge the administration’s re-expansion of expedited removal.
Beyond that, the Trump administration is expected to lean into a program known as 287(g) that allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement to do immigration work. Some cities and states, including California, already forbid local participation in that program.
Kevin Johnson, a professor of law and Chicano studies at the University of California Davis, said he was especially worried about local law enforcement becoming involved in the mass deportation effort because of what happened in the 1930s, when local authorities rounded up people believed to be Mexican — including U.S. citizens — and sent them south on trains and boats.
“We have rules and laws regulating removals from the country, but if we start down the path of mass arrests and quick-and-dirty deportations, then those rules are not likely to be followed,” Johnson said.
Effects of a Deportation
Most mass deportation efforts are rooted in a nativist belief that immigrants take jobs from U.S.-born workers, according to Tom Wong, a professor of political science and founding director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at University of California, San Diego. He said that belief is neither accurate nor rational, but the effects can cause lasting harm.
“Immigrants are complements, not substitutes,” he said, giving the example of an immigrant worker offering child care services so that a U.S.-born single mother can also work.
He said that economists have found labor market shortages following mass deportations. The coming removals, he said, could lead to an increase in food prices as well as gaps in construction. Advocates pointed to the daunting task of rebuilding in the wake of the Los Angeles fires as a project that could be impacted by mass deportations.
The American Immigration Council recently estimated that Trump’s deportation plans could shrink the United States’ GDP by 4.2% to 6.8%. According to the immigration policy think tank’s October report, undocumented workers paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes in 2022, along with $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, while contributing $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.
But Wong said he does not think messaging about potential economic harm will convince the voters who elected Trump.
“I think the American public is willing to pay the costs,” Wong said.
“It’s going to take a lot of pain before people realize how damaging mass deportation efforts are,” he added.
Wong said that members of the public may begin to wake up to the problems caused by mass deportation once they see the effects on neighbors, co-workers and loved ones.
Rodriguez, the man who is among those facing potential imminent deportation under the second Trump administration, said he works two jobs, one in construction and the other at a restaurant.
“I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve never asked the government to maintain me,” he said. “The only thing we’ve done is work every day.”
He first came to the United States in the 1990s, fleeing the civil war in Guatemala and the obligatory military service that came with it. Over the years, he tried to get attorneys to help him sort out his case, but for one reason or another, it never worked out. He remained undocumented.
Meanwhile, he got married and started a family. Then in the mid-aughts, ICE deported him.
“I had my family and kids here. I was paying for a house,” Rodriguez said. “I had to come back.”
He crossed through the desert mountains and returned to California, but during the Obama administration, ICE found him again. This time, the agency allowed him to stay temporarily as long as he checked in periodically with its officers.
Rodriguez said he is worried about what will happen to his family if ICE sends him back again. He doesn’t want his children to move to Guatemala, and he knows they will suffer emotionally and financially in his absence.
He said that when he was in ICE custody, teachers noticed a change in his son’s behavior. The boy didn’t play with his friends, and they ended up sending him to a counselor.
Rodriguez is the breadwinner, supporting his children as they pursue college degrees.
“Under the law, I guess it’s right, but for many of us who have been here for years, the family is who suffers,” he said.
Growing Gardens
Though some polls have found public support for mass deportations, Johnson, the Davis School of Law professor, said he believes that many will protest if Trump’s threats become a reality.
He noted that organized political movements in the Latino community didn’t exist during the historical removals of the 1930s and 1950s in the way that they do today.
“There was no MALDEF that was going to sue to try to stop the repatriation,” he said, referring to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a prominent civil rights organization.
He acknowledged that there appears to be a lot of support for mass removals, but he also predicted national outrage. Family separation, one of the Trump administration’s key immigration policies in its first term, ended because the public “couldn’t stomach it,” Johnson said.
Tsurumoto Grassi, associate director of Alliance San Diego and a descendant of Japanese Americans whom the government forced from their homes during World War II, said the stories of resilience during previous immigration roundups can teach community members how to navigate the years ahead.
Japanese Americans held under former President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order made gardens and planted trees around the prison camps that were hastily constructed to separate them from the rest of society, she said.
“They found ways to still come together as a community and find their dignity in the midst of all that,” Tsurumoto Grassi said.
She said that community wisdom from those past experiences is among the tools that people can draw on today.
“How do we make it through a time when people are treating individuals like they are less than human?” she said. “We need to look to those stories to give us hope for how do we get through what looks to be a difficult time ahead.”
Rodriguez said he’s hoping that the public will consider people like him before deciding to support the mass deportation effort.
“The most important thing is that society puts its hand on its heart and thinks about all the people who will be affected if this new administration does everything that it’s saying,” he said.
