Trump’s deportation plan is missing key details

This article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings here. To submit a question to next week’s Friday Mailbag, email [email protected].
Hello, friends. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was in Washington, D.C., with former President Donald Trump Monday, and by the looks of it, the two are developing a relationship, after Cox endorsed him last month. A far cry from where Cox was previously.
Trump’s ‘America Last’ immigration plan
Many journalists — myself included — are frustrated that Harris, now a month into her tenure atop the Democratic ticket, has yet to release her full policy platform, or speak to the press. We’ve seen sneak peeks: she laid out some of her plans on the economy a week ago Friday, and in her acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention, she touched on her foreign policy strategy.
Anyone frustrated with Harris, though, should also have questions for Trump — who, a year into his second campaign for president, has yet to offer coherent plans as to how he’ll carry out major parts of his platform.
One of his promises is to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Last week, as the Democratic convention came to a close, Trump visited the southern border in Sierra Vista, Arizona. My colleague Brigham Tomco was there and asked Trump how he planned to carry out that deportation operation.
Trump’s answer: “We’ll work with locals — and they’re going to bring them (migrants) to us — and we’ll get them over the border, and we’ll make arrangements with the countries, and the countries will accept them back, and if they don’t accept them back, we do no trade with those countries, and we charge them big tariffs.”
But Trump’s plan is missing some important details. A few thoughts:
Local law enforcement can’t just “bring” migrants to ICE officials. Whether local law enforcement — what Trump meant when he said “locals,” he later specified — can enforce immigration law has long been a matter of debate. Can a local police officer apprehend an individual because they are in the country illegally? No, because they have no authority to enforce immigration law, which is controlled by the federal government.
Some states are pushing to change that, including Arizona, which will vote on a ballot measure this November that would allow local police officers to arrest and jail migrants who they witness crossing the border illegally. In addition, there are some programs — like Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s 287(g) program — that delegates some authority to enforce immigration law to local and state law enforcement. For the most part, these agreements are between ICE and specific sheriff’s departments across the country, and local officials only have authority to question an individual’s immigration status after they’ve been arrested for a non-immigration-related offenses.
While ICE covers training costs associated with the program, local sheriff’s offices bear the brunt for the rest of the costs, which can be big — in Gwinnett County, Georgia, the program costs taxpayers as much as $3.7 million annually, a Niskanen Center report found. And a report by Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity found that broad enforcement programs like 287(g) are not effective in reducing crime or enforcing public safety, “mainly because they fail to target serious offenders.”
Nonetheless, during Trump’s first term, ICE worked hard to expand the program — with mixed results. “While the 287(g) program has yielded successes, ICE recognizes the program is not universally regarded as the most effective or appropriate model for all stakeholders or in every jurisdiction,” ICE told The Washington Post in 2021.
That brings us to Trump’s plan to “charge” countries “big tariffs.” If we deport unauthorized migrants back to their home countries and those home countries do not accept them, Trump implies, the U.S. will simply stop trading with that country, and/or implement tariffs on goods imported from those countries.
This is bad economic policy, according to Michael Kofoed, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics. (He’s also a Deseret News contributor.) “Everyone forgets that sanctions and tariffs are not a tax on the other country,” Kofoed told me. It’s a tax on goods brought into our country, and “that tax gets pushed back on the American worker.”
“If I’m Ford Motor, and we shut off Toyotas from coming, I have no incentive to lower my prices because I have less competition,” he continued. “So I’m going to push my prices upwards to equal the amount of the tariff, essentially.”
“It becomes very good populist politics, but very bad economic policy,” Kofoed said.
Trump doesn’t take into account the cost of deporting millions of people — the bus tickets, chartered flights, nights in detention centers and so on, all paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Nor does it consider the cost of shrinking the U.S. economy by deporting workers. Nor does it account for the humane arguments against mass deportation, especially the mass deportation of peaceful, law-abiding individuals. Trump’s order would likely begin with this group, as a significant backlog of unexecuted judge-issued deportation orders exists, but these individuals are still in the U.S. because they have not had a run-in with law enforcement.
So, yes, Trump’s plan to carry out the “largest deportation operation” ever may appeal to some voters, but the implementation would get very messy.
Thanks for reading. See you on the trail.
Editor’s Note: The Deseret News is committed to covering issues of substance in the 2024 presidential race from its unique perspective and editorial values. Our team of political reporters will bring you in-depth coverage of the most relevant news and information to help you make an informed decision. Find our complete coverage of the election here.