Trump’s Deportation Machine

If his transition team is any indication, Trump will pursue a policy of mass deportation to drive a wedge between workers.

By David L. Wilson, Jacobin
December 19, 2016

Like so much about the incoming administration, president-elect Donald Trump’s intentions for undocumented immigrants remain unclear. But he seems likely to go forward with a substantial program of “getting them out of our country.”

In his first major post-election interview, Trump announced that he plans to deport two or even three million immigrants “here illegally,” “people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers.” In reality, as Vox’s Dara Lind explains, there simply aren’t two or three million undocumented immigrants with criminal records, much less gang members and drug dealers.

The people Trump would expel would mostly be residents with green cards who arrived as children and ended up with criminal convictions, immigrants who returned here to reunite with loved ones despite a prior deportation, and, more likely than not, thousands of undocumented workers swept up in raids, like the restaurant employees arrested recently in Buffalo.[...]

Read the full article:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/trump-undocumented-immigration-ice-sessions/

Correction: The article states that “[t]he last general to head the immigration enforcement apparatus was Joseph Swing.” The last general in this position was Leonard Chapman, who was Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization from 1973 to 1977.