When they come for your neighbours…..

it gets your attention

Immigrant Family Statue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Eamon Up North/Pexels

I have sometimes wondered what I would have done had I lived in WWII Europe, when many people were being rounded up and shipped to labour camps in other countries or to concentration camps across Nazi-controlled Europe. 

As my neighbours were being rounded up, based on new laws, would I have been brave enough to help them? Or to help others to do so?

I have been thinking about this as I read about Trump’s plans to deport millions of people from the United States if he wins the US presidential election in November. This is not just a question of the US-Mexico border - the plan would scour the US for people who are unauthorized immigrants and deport them.

Stephen Miller, who worked on immigration during Trump’s presidency 2016-2020, calls it “a great undertaking,” comparable in scope to building the Panama Canal. The second term immigration agenda “re-implements all of the hugely popular and successful policies of the previous four years, and then uses that as a foundation for year five, six, seven, and eight of the Trump immigration program,” he told Charlie Kirk.

He described the logistical planning. Assuming you arrest unauthorized immigrants in large-scale raids, you have to have somewhere to put them and a plan to send them back to the country they came from, he says.

“So you build these facilities where then you're able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right. On Thursday and Sunday are the flights back to different Asian countries. So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets. And that's how you're able to scale and achieve the efficiency.”

In terms of who is going to do the roundups, he says, “you go to the red state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers. They know their states, they know their communities, they know their cities. So it's not like you're asking somebody to move away from their family, away from their home….. So you have experienced ICE veterans who are leading the operations and then you scale up the personnel by bringing in both other federal law enforcement officers, you know, think DEA, ATF, et cetera, and then the National Guardsmen. And then we're the ones who provide them to state and local sheriffs as well, too.”

This will happen right away if Trump is back in the Oval Office in 2025, Miller says. “If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately, and it will be joyous, and it will be wonderful, and it will be everything you want it to be,” he told Charlie Kirk.

The mass deportations, Miller said, are actually much simpler than what Trump achieved in the first term with Remain in Mexico, safe third agreements, Title 42, and all the other turn-away programs at the border which effectively shut down asylum. That, Miller said, “was far more legally complicated and challenging and novel by comparison than the mass deportation operation to remove all of these illegal immigrants that Biden has let in, which, as I mentioned earlier, is primarily, although not exclusively, is primarily a massive logistical challenge.”

Wondering how Americans might react if this plan came to pass and roundups of people started taking place in the US interior, I looked back to what happened in 2018 and 2019 in Tennessee - where Trump had won strong support - to get a sense of the response in communities when neighbours start to disappear.

The state’s immigrant population was more than 320,000 and they played an important role in the labour force. But not all of them were documented, and there were many ‘mixed-status families’ - one or both parents undocumented, children born in the US. In 2017, state lawmakers had passed the nation’s first law requiring stiffer sentences for defendants who were in the US illegally and in 2018, required the police to help enforce immigration laws and made it illegal for local governments to adopt ‘sanctuary’ policies. And as it turned out, not every employer thoroughly checked employees’ documentation.

One of the first big workplace raids under Trump’s presidency took place near the small Tennessee town of Morristown in April 2018. Ninety-seven workers were detained - every Latino employee at the Bean Station plant, it turned out, except a man who had hidden in a freezer.

Morristown, a town of 30,000 northeast of Knoxville, had drawn migrant workers from Latin America since the early 1990s, when they first came to work on the region’s abundant tomato farms. Undocumented workers from Mexico and Guatemala had been crucial to the growth of Southeastern Provision, the family-owned abattoir 10 miles north of Morristown in Bean Station that was the county’s third largest employer before the raid.

Hambien County, Tennessee, had turned to immigrants to work in its meat, poultry and canning plants, and automotive parts, plastics and other factories as local people struggled with a meth and opioid epidemic. As it got more difficult to go back and forth across the border, many families settled into the community, enrolled their kids in school, and joined churches where they baptized their American-born children. 

By 2018, Latinos made up about 11% of Hamblen County’s population and accounted for one of every four students in its public schools. “We’re very proud of our diverse heritage,” said Marshall Ramsey, president of the Morristown Area Chamber of Commerce. “My wife is actually a seventh-grade school teacher here in town and about 50% of her class is Hispanic. She raves about parent-teacher conferences. The parents show up. The kids know that the parents have high expectations of them. The parents feel like the kids have been given an opportunity.”

But on the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Southeastern Provision plant and sent dozens of workers to out-of-state detention centers, “people in Morristown began to ask questions many hadn’t thought through before — to the federal government, to the police, to their church leaders, to each other.”

Opinion in the county was divided about the raid. While there was support for the enforcement process, there also was a supportive community response from people who saw the workers as their neighbours.

“Immigration is kind of a hot-button topic here,” salesman Hank Smith told the New Yorker. He said it was only when the arrests happened close to home that he realized many of these people had lived in the area for more than a decade. “They work hard and they do the jobs that no one else wants to do.” He also felt strong sympathy for their kids. “I felt I understood the legal side of it. But this is the first time I really started looking at the human side. Families are being divided.”

“Donations of food, clothing and toys for families of the workers streamed in at such volume there was a traffic jam to get into the parking lot of a church,” said the New York Times. “Professors at the college extended a speaking invitation to a young man whose brother and uncle were detained in the raid. Schoolteachers cried as they tried to comfort students whose parents were suddenly gone. There was standing room only at a prayer vigil that drew about 1,000 people to a school gym.”

The parish center was converted into a crisis response center and all day, people arrived with food, clothing, toys and supplies for the affected families. Volunteers, who showed up by the dozens, received color-coded tags: Yellow for teachers, white for lawyers, and pink for general helpers, who prepared meals in the kitchen, packed grocery bags and performed other tasks. In smaller rooms, teachers entertained children with stories while their parents received legal services.”

More than 500 children missed school the morning after the raid, because many kids in the town were left without one of their parents. On the evening of April 7, about 120 teachers and school staff packed the church’s basement to talk about how to assist students. On a poster board, they scrawled their feelings. “I cried Thursday night wondering which of my students were without parents that night,” one teacher wrote. “I feel helpless,” wrote another.

A week after the raid, about 300 people took to Morristown’s downtown streets in the evening to draw attention to the plight of the families. Some people drove for an hour to participate and came with a cheque to help the immigrants.

One of the plant workers was an American citizen who tried to talk to the workers. The ICE officers put her in metal handcuffs. “When I told them I am American, they asked me, where are your documents? I said I had them in my car. When I told them that, they asked me, why don’t you carry your documents? I told them I don’t carry my documents with me because where we work is very dirty.”

It turned out that, unlike employers in Morristown itself, the Bean Station plant’s owner had not confirmed the immigration status of employees he hired. He was eventually charged and jailed in consequence. It was one of a number of problems with the plant, which was the third largest employer in the county, including the lack of adequate sewage treatment.

Initially, Grainger County mayor Mark Hipsher worried about the impact of the raid on the local economy. "If you just figure 250 head of cattle a day, 5 days a week for a year is over $30 million at $500 a head. So that would be a big impact."

Two weeks after the raid, the slaughterhouse was only operating at 10% capacity, processing meat already in the coolers. A year later, the plant closed, a $20 million economic loss that disrupted a network that had processed 63,000 head of cattle every year, supplying buyers in Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. 

State Sen. Steve Southerland, a Hamblen County Republican who chaired the Senate Energy, Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee, said the repercussions prompted near-emergency action at the highest levels of state government in Tennessee and Kentucky. “We had no idea about its importance to the cattle market.”

“We all get a little smarter as the issue gets more personal,” Morristown mayor Gary Chesney summed up for the New Yorker. He was proud of the town’s capacity both for conservatism and for reasonableness, and for how locals took care of the innocent folks - the kids whose parents were picked up. National politics had intensified the local conversation about immigration, he said, but he believed some of the acrimony stemmed from misinformation about the undocumented “gaming the system” or committing crimes.

After that East Tennessee raid, ICE conducted mass worksite raids in Arkansas, California, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. In the aftermath of the East Tennessee raid, the National Immigration Law Centre developed a model for a coordinated response to defend workers and transform the community in the wake of a massive raid.

But planning now seems to have moved quite a bit beyond that stage.

The Niskanen Foundation says Project 2025’s immigration proposals are “engineered to dismantle the foundations of our immigration system”. It cites as “most troubling” the idea of blocking federal financial aid for college students if their state permits certain immigrant groups, including Dreamers with legal status, to access in-state tuition; terminating the legal status of 500,000 Dreamers by eliminating staff time for reviewing and processing renewal applications; suspending updates to the annual eligible country lists for H-2A and H-2B temporary worker visas; barring US citizens from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a US citizen or legal permanent resident; and forcing states to share driver’s licenses and taxpayer identification information with federal authorities or risk critical funding.

The plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the US to work, says Radley Balko. “It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations.” Trump would also invoke a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.

Balko says the Trump immigration plan would be the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history and, using 2017 ICE cost estimates, could cost about $210 billion or 14% more than the US army’s annual budget.

“Trump’s plan would require deportation officials to go into cities, workplaces, colleges, and neighborhoods, find undocumented immigrants, and forcibly extract them,” Balko said.

In response to those who say mass deportations would cause social and economic turmoil and disrupt the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector, Miller told the New York Times that it would be “a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”

The Center for Migration Studies prepared a statistical portrait of the US undocumented population “with an emphasis on the social and economic condition of mixed-status households - that is, households that contain a US citizen and an undocumented resident.”

In 2014, there were 3.3 million mixed-status households in the US. Six million US-born citizens shared 3 million households with undocumented residents (mostly their parents). Of these US-born citizens, 5.7 million are under age 18, and 2.9 million undocumented residents were 14 years old or younger when brought to the US.

A total of 1.3 million, or 13% of the undocumented over age 18, have college degrees. Two thirds of those with college degrees have degrees in four fields: engineering, business, communications, and social sciences. Six million undocumented residents, or 55% of the total, speak English well, very well, or only English.

The unemployment rate for the undocumented was 6.6%, the same as the national rate in January 2014. 73% had incomes at or above the poverty level. 62% have lived in the US for 10 years or more. Their median household income was $41,000, about $12,700 lower than the national figure of $53,700 in 2014. Three-quarters of a million undocumented residents are self-employed, having created their own jobs and in the process, creating jobs for many others.

One study estimates that mass deportation “would reduce U.S. GDP by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.” Foreign Policy in a recent article, laments the lack of discussion about how increasing legal immigration pathways would benefit the economy.

“Undocumented workers benefit the U.S. economy; most work in the informal economy and take jobs that documented workers don’t want, including in industries such as agriculture, food service, maintenance, and domestic service.”

“But the expansion of pathways for legal migration could generate future economic growth by reducing migrants’ barriers to employment—allowing individuals to take jobs in sectors for which their skills are well-suited, rather than facing restrictions due to their immigration status—and increasing their opportunities for economic mobility.”

“Not only do immigrants support a population that is both aging and living longer, they also help industries fill labor shortages, drive economic growth through consumption, and overcome short-term gaps in skilled industries not met by the native population. (Currently, industries such as hospitality and retail, which offer entry-level jobs, are experiencing unemployment rates greater than many of those that require specialized skills.) The influx of migrants has grown the U.S. labor force—of which foreign-born migrants make up nearly 19%—allowing the United States to generate more jobs and outperform its European peers, according to the International Monetary Fund.”

Sources:

ICE Came for a Tennessee Town’s Immigrants. The Town Fought Back. New York Times, Jun. 8 2018

Mass Deportations Would Impoverish US Families and Create Immense Social Costs Center for Migration Studies, 2017

In Rural Tennessee, a Big ICE Raid Makes Some Conservative Voters Rethink Trump’s Immigration Agenda. New Yorker, Apr. 19 2018

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans. New York Times, Nov. 11, 2023

How Immigrants Have Dispersed Throughout the Country US Census Bureau, Apr. 9 2024

Sweeping Raids, Mass Deportations: Donald Trump's 2025 Plan to Fix the Border. The Charlie Kirk Show, Feb. 22, 2024

Trump’s Deportation Army. Radley Balko, May 21 2024