Speaker 1: Day one, I will seal the border, stop the invasion. And we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.

Speaker 2: According to the latest estimates, approximately 11.7 million undocumented immigrants currently reside in the United States, which amounts to roughly 3.5 percent of the total U.S. population. The United States has more international migrants than any other country in the world, surpassing the total of the next four countries combined. In recent years, the United States has not deported more than half a million immigrants under formal removal orders in a single fiscal year. If President Trump follows through on his promise, the country could see deportation operation on an unprecedented scale.

Speaker 1: Is it your plan to deport everyone who is here illegally over the next four years? Well, I think you have to do it. If you know you have rules, regulations, laws, they came in illegally.

Speaker 3: Last time there was a lot of focus on building the wall. This time there's much more focus on the interior and much more rhetoric about the interior. So I think that they will feel the need to really show some results.

Speaker 2: So how exactly will the mass deportation be carried out and what impact will it have on the U.S. economy? Many experts warn that a deportation of such scale could be devastating to the American economy.

Speaker 4: Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the surge in illegal immigration over the last few years will increase gross domestic product by about nine trillion dollars cumulatively over the next decade, reduce the deficit by about a trillion dollars. These are very significant. And it's only part of the illegal immigrant population that he's talking about rolling back or eliminating.

Speaker 5: Unauthorized immigrants are key parts of the workforce, especially in agriculture, construction, manufacturing and the service sector. So those areas of the economy would be hit particularly hard when there's fewer workers to take the jobs in those sectors. But U.S. born people do not slot into those jobs that are left behind by unauthorized workers. And that's because the jobs are less desirable.

Speaker 3: Immigrants are also consumers. So if you have a community where 10 percent of the people are unauthorized immigrants and suddenly those people are no longer there, you know, buying all of the other goods and services and that can hurt the whole economy of that community.

Speaker 2: Research has also shown that 44,000 U.S. born workers could lose their job for every half a million immigrants removed from the labor force.

Speaker 3: As an example, if there's a construction company and they rely on an immigrant workforce to do some of the hard labor, the roofing, the digging, the laying of bricks. But they they also employ a lot of other workers as well who might be U.S. born to do marketing, to be an accountant, to manage the workers, to manage relationships with clients. If that firm loses their immigrant workers who do the manual labor, they may also need to lay off their U.S. born workers who perform a variety of other jobs because they can't sign contracts if they don't have the workers to do the work.

Speaker 2: A sudden reduction in the labor force could also have an impact on prices.

Speaker 3: There's a sense that new immigrants have placed a strain on the United States and really taken a lot of resources at the same time that Americans were struggling with the impacts of high inflation and rising prices.

Speaker 5: But immigrants, especially unauthorized immigrants, are much more likely to work in the types of jobs that create the goods and services where we're seeing the prices go up. And so we can't say for sure what the effects will be. But based on what we know from past mass deportation efforts, it seems like especially on these goods and services where unauthorized immigrants are super concentrated, like construction and agriculture, that the prices are likely going to go up.

Speaker 2: Undocumented immigrants are also a substantial source of revenue for governments, paying $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022.

Speaker 5: And so if we were to remove immigrants, this would have a negative effect on the federal government budget. And this is especially true for really important programs like Medicare and Social Security. Immigrants typically pay into those programs, but they're not eligible to receive benefits from those programs. And we know that those are programs that are having huge budget crises already, and we expect them to have even bigger crises in the future.

Speaker 6: Well, I would go back to what I think Tom Homan said and others, which is what is the price of national security? How do you put a price on not having within your borders literally hundreds of thousands of people about whom you know nothing? Congress decides to let in another 5 million aliens for whatever reason and make them Americans in a different process. That's Congress's privilege and prerogative. But until they change the laws, we have to enforce the laws.

Speaker 2: The net cost of illegal immigration for the United States was estimated at $150.7 billion at the start of 2023.

Speaker 6: Entirely open borders and a welfare state absolutely does not compute. You're seeing this not just in the United States, you're seeing it in Great Britain, in Canada, in Germany, in France, in Italy, where the needs of this large population of recent arrivals are exceeding the capacity of the host country to sustain them.

Speaker 2: However, some experts question how much undocumented immigrants can benefit from government welfare.

Speaker 5: Unauthorized immigrants, unlike refugees or asylum seekers that actually do have at least some kind of legal status, are not eligible for most federal, state and local programs. And so unauthorized immigrants are actually much less expensive if you're thinking just in terms of government spending.

Speaker 2: Nonetheless, major cities across the U.S. have seen immense spending in response to the sudden influx of migrants. New York City is projecting to spend $4.75 billion on asylum seekers in fiscal year 2025. And Chicago has spent over $600 million on costs associated with new arrivals.

Speaker 6: I've been watching people in Chicago and New York who have lived there for generations complaining to their local government that, look, what about us? You guys are spending billions of dollars on social services that we don't qualify for, for people who just arrived in the country last night.

Speaker 2: The exact logistics of Trump's operation remain unclear, but the incoming administration has emphasized that it would prioritize deporting individuals who pose a threat to the United States. We're starting with the criminals and we got to do it.

Speaker 6: I would say that they are taking very seriously the idea of resuming law enforcement and trying to reestablish the rule of law.

Speaker 3: I think most Americans would agree that if somebody is in the United States without authorization and they've murdered someone or committed some other terrible kind of crime, that they should be deported.

Speaker 2: But some experts questioned the intent behind these claims.

Speaker 4: If you look at what they did last time, they rescinded the requirement to target criminals first. That was in place under the Obama administration. So there's absolutely no basis for claiming they will go after criminals first.

Speaker 2: President-elect Trump has also stated that he will declare a national emergency to carry out his plans. This grants the president over 130 special authorities, including the ability to redirect certain funds to initiatives that the president deems necessary. During his first term, Trump used a similar approach to allocate billions of dollars toward building the border wall after Congress had originally rejected his request.

Speaker 4: The main constraints on removals, in many cases, it does come down to funding and logistics and appropriation and priorities. And this time they have more allies in Congress who want to fund the operation.

Speaker 2: It would cost the U.S. an estimated $88 billion annually to deport one million immigrants per year.

Speaker 4: That's essentially 10 years of ISIS budget in one year. And it's going to be used in ways that are much more, whether I want to call it efficient, I don't know, but cost effective than what they're doing now.

Speaker 2: A critical component of Trump's plan involves using military assets to aid the effort. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 has generally prevented presidents from deploying federal military personnel as a domestic police force. During America's largest deportation operation in 1954, this law prevented President Eisenhower from using troops to return more than a million Mexican immigrants out of the country.

Speaker 4: We have a tradition in the United States dating back a century and a half that the military is not used on U.S. soil to enforce civilian laws. And this would be a breach in that custom.

Speaker 2: But there are other ways that the military can assist without directly enforcing the law themselves.

Speaker 4: Lesser involvement from the military wouldn't really be unprecedented. Involving them as hosts for immigration detention centers, not really that unusual.

Speaker 3: It's more likely that members of the military would do back-end operations, sort of paperwork, freeing up ICE agents to do actual arrests and more direct processing of people.

Speaker 2: Trump has also discussed invoking laws like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to help out with the operation.

Speaker 4: The Alien Enemies Act is an authority under which the president of the United States can order non-citizens who are from a country with which the United States is at war or being subject to an invasion. They can detain them, arrest them and remove them from the United States strictly based on their nationality. While on its face, it seems pretty clearly to go beyond what the statute envisioned. Many courts are loathe to intervene and take a stance on issues related to national security or war and peace.

Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Tom Homan, who will be overseeing border control and immigration during Trump's second term, has indicated that the administration could rely on private contractors for tasks that do not require credentials. Companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which have previously assisted ICE with migrant detention efforts, saw their stock value soar following Trump's election.

Speaker 5: Given the existing resources towards immigration enforcement activity, there is no way to do a deportation effort on the scale that Trump has talked about. Any mass deportation effort of one million people or more would require huge resource investments, including contracting with private companies likely to build more detention centers. We're actually seeing that happen under President Biden right now. More detention centers are being built. So I would expect that to continue if there was some kind of mass deportation increase.

Speaker 2: Experts say that the great challenge to the deportation plan may lie in securing cooperation from the states.

Speaker 3: The majority of deportations happen after somebody is picked up by local law enforcement, whether for a minor crime or a major crime. ICE finds out that that person's in custody. They request to the local law enforcement to hold that migrant for up to 48 hours. And then ICE comes and takes custody and starts people's processing for removal. For a variety of reasons, more jurisdictions have decided not to comply with these requests from ICE to hold people. These local policies seem to be one of the reasons why interior deportations dropped from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, even though the Trump administration last time also said that they wanted to really ramp up deportations and immigration enforcement.

Speaker 7: If you know any harbors concealed with illegal alien, I will prosecute. Tom Homan directed those powerful words at Chicago's Mayor Brandon Johnson as the incoming border czar gets ready to conduct a mass deportation starting next month.

Speaker 6: The federal government has competency for immigration matters, not the states, and they're challenging the federal government to to do its job. What I would say to that is there's a lot of federal money flowing into these cities and states supporting their their police, their their justice system, their educational system, their hospitals and all kinds of other things that they expect the federal government to give them. I don't really see why the federal government, at least the White House, would support giving billions of dollars to cities and states that are ignoring their obligation to help the federal government. So we may end up with a situation where there's a financial crunch which forces a rethink.

Speaker 2: The question of how to approach immigration in the U.S. is as complex as the issue is divisive.

Speaker 3: I think that our current conversation has been really divisive and also very black and white. It's, you know, for or against mass deportation. But I think that there's some nuance that could be found. We could both enforce our immigration laws more at the border. Think about removing people who are a threat to our country and think about offering some legal status to people who have been an important part of our workforce, of our communities, who have, you know, U.S.-born children. I think Americans would support that. I think that Congress is not ready to talk about it. Congress is struggling to pass legislation overall. It's really struggling to pass immigration legislation and partisan politics get in the way. But I actually think there are solutions that Americans are pretty broadly in agreement with.