Trump's threat of mass deportation is a fearmongering hollow lie, and here is why

Trump border camp in 2018

Logistics is the reason Donald Trump will never, ever, even if he wins election and invokes the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, be able to deport the 15 million, or 20 million, or 25 million – whatever the number he throws out seemingly according to his mood or state of mental deterioration.

Let’s take 20 million, the number in the middle, double the population of Los Angeles County, which occupies about 4,000 square miles. 

20 million undocumented people means they are spread out over almost 4 million square miles. Do you know how big the continental U.S. is?  It’s about 3,000 miles from Maine to Washington, and 1,700 miles from North Dakota to south Texas.  Any way you look at it, the United States of America is big. 

We know immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, live in every state, in large cities and small towns both.  Most of them who are not children have jobs.  They rent apartments and houses.  They own cars.  Their kids are in schools.  Some of them even own businesses through partnerships with citizens or immigrants with documented status.  Who knew a town in Ohio called Springfield had more than 100 Haitian immigrants before Trump and Vance began their lie-fest about immigrants kidnapping and eating neighbors’ pets? I sure didn’t.  I don’t know how many immigrants live in Dover, New Jersey, either, although I drove through there recently and discovered the town of 18,500 is a treasure trove of Mexican and Central American restaurants, so Dover must have quite a substantial immigrant population.  Dover isn’t far from Morristown, New Jersey.  I don’t know the immigrant population there, either, but I spent a night in a big hospital there recently, and just from that experience, I can tell you that the size of the immigrant population of Morristown is considerable.

So, Stephen “I’m chasing ‘em, boss, I’m chasing em’” Miller and his round ‘em up cowboys will be looking for their 20 million undocumented immigrants all over the place.  Until now, at least, we haven’t been a “show me your papers” country.  Even assuming they try to create a national requirement for some sort of domestic passport, that attempt will face countless legal challenges in federal and state courts, so that won’t be happening anytime soon.  Which creates another obvious problem, that of distinguishing U.S. citizens from immigrants, and documented immigrants from undocumented ones.

Let’s assume that in the beginning, they are able to find a relatively large number of undocumented immigrants.  What are they going to do with them?  Sure, they have talked of building what amounts to concentration camps where they say they will hold them until they can be deported.  They did this before, remember, when they hastily threw up some wire-enclosed camps near the border, grabbed people coming across, and threw them into the camps, even separating parents from children and giving them plastic “space blankets” to sleep under on bare floors.  At one point, they even had people fenced in under a freeway, out in the open, except for the shade provided by the overpass.

Their attempts then were haphazard and inhumane, and they might try the same thing again.  Last time, however, it was just a few thousand people they captured right at the border and had to move only a few miles to the camps they threw up.  This time they’re talking about rounding up 20 million people scattered throughout the whole country.  If they were to make some sort of serious attempt, how would they do it?  How would they move them?  Where would they put them, not only down near the border, but if and when they find large numbers in the center of the country, far from the border?

There is one organization in the United States with experience in moving large numbers of people from one place to another:  the U.S. Army. 

Let’s discuss what it takes to move, say, a brigade of 15,000 soldiers.  The first thing you need to understand is that the organizational structure of this many soldiers is already in place.  A brigade is broken down into three or four battalions.  Each battalion has four companies of a hundred to two hundred soldiers.  One of the companies, the headquarters company, is organized and trained for the purpose of doing things like mass movements. 

The companies and battalions all have their own supply systems, including the ability to feed hundreds or thousands of soldiers during a move.  They also have the vehicles necessary to move the soldiers and their equipment in trucks and personnel carriers, and they have the capability to house hundreds or even thousands of soldiers overnight or for more extended periods using tents and other temporary structures.  The soldiers themselves carry the equipment for sleeping, such as ground pads and sleeping bags.  They have the uniforms necessary to keep themselves warm in cold weather as well.

It is very, very difficult to move even 15-20,000 soldiers.  It takes weeks of planning and preparation.  All the equipment must be checked.  All the vehicles must be in operating order.  All the supplies necessary for the move such as gas, water, and food must be made ready.  There will be breakdowns of vehicles and other equipment.  Soldiers who can make necessary repairs must be present with all the tools and extra parts needed to effect the repairs.

The most important thing to realize about what I’m describing here is that this is about moving the soldiers themselves, and nobody else.  If anyone who is not a soldier is included, every extra person takes extra effort and extra supplies and extra equipment.  Even one additional person.

So, just to begin, for any immigrants Trump and his gaggle of Brown Shirts are able to find, starting on day one, they will have to be housed and fed.  There will have to be vehicles in which to move them. 

Trump and Vance and others have talked about “using the military” in some fashion to accomplish all their plans to round up immigrants.  This is a fantasy.  The military does not have domestic powers of arrest or imprisonment.  Even when National Guard troops have been used along the border, it has been to supplement domestic law enforcement and border patrol agents.  Soldiers are not empowered to arrest or detain for purposes of customs and immigration. 

Trump has made noises of invoking the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the law that was used to place Japanese, Italian, and German immigrants in internment camps during World War II.  That act, which has been widely condemned for its misuse during the 1940’s, creates a condition that this nation must be at war with enemy nations in order to be used.  It also specifies that any “alien” must be served with an “order” to depart the country and given a time frame for this to happen, and only then can the “alien” be detained by a “marshal” reporting to the Secretary of State (!).  If the “alien” is found to have violated the order, “upon conviction thereof” the “alien” can be imprisoned for a term not to exceed three years and then deported with no possibility of returning and seeking citizenship again.

No mention is made in the text of this terrible law of using the U.S. military as a police force to imprison and deport anyone who is not a citizen.  And oddly, the Alien and Sedition Act appears to confer upon “aliens” many of the same rights immigrants have under our current immigration laws.

While Trump was in office, he was not able to use active duty, reserve, or National Guard soldiers as immigration cops on the border, and there is little reason to think that courts would allow the military to be used domestically for this purpose now.

But…let’s take a nightmare scenario…and assume that Trump somehow orders the military to be used in the “round up” and deportation scheme.  Neither the active-duty army, reserves, or National Guard have the supplies and equipment necessary to do anything more than move themselves from one place to another.  Buses would need to be used to move undocumented immigrants.  At 40 persons per bus, that would mean some 500,000 buses would be necessary to move 20 million people.  There are about 500,000 school buses in this country that move school children to and from school every day.  School buses amount to the largest transportation fleet in this country, but they are in use every day, and if Trump tried to commandeer them, chaos would result.  I realize that “chaos” is Trump’s middle name, but not even Donald Trump is ready for what would happen if schools were shut down because school buses were somehow nationalized to move undocumented immigrants.

And who would drive them?  A commercial license is necessary in most states to drive a bus.  If Trump were to conscript school bus drivers to drive the school buses full of immigrants from, say, Nebraska to Texas or Arizona, they would have to be paid…and housed…and fed…and so on, and so on, and so on.

Do you see what we’re looking at here?  Rounding up and deporting 20 million undocumented immigrants, even using the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, would entail a logistical capability that not even the U.S. military has.  It would entail, under that unthinkable law itself, the issuance of formal “orders” that under the language of the law would involve the Department of State, and then arrests of those not complying with the “order,” and then trial and conviction of violating the “order,” and then imprisonment, and then deportation. 

We don’t have enough immigration courts and judges to handle the thousands of applications for asylum in the system right now.  The backlog is at least part of the reason we have so many immigrants in this country with undocumented status waiting for hearings, appeals, hell, just waiting for paperwork.  Congress has been asked repeatedly to increase the budget for more immigration courts and judges, and it hasn’t happened.

The words pipe and dream come to mind if you step back even a half-foot and consider Trump’s rhetoric about deporting undocumented immigrants.  It may be red meat for the MAGA masses, but it’s as untethered from reality as his talk about Hannibal Lecter.