Immigration group to the press: It’s the mass deportations, stupid

A top immigration advocacy group is pushing the press to focus immigration coverage on former President Trump’s promise of mass deportations, a series of proposals they say would wreak havoc on immigrant communities and the economy in general.

In a memo to the country’s editorial boards, America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas made the case that coverage should focus on mass deportations because of their potential consequences, but also because of their scope, their unpopularity, and because, she wrote, a mass deportation plan is ready to go on day one of a second Trump administration.

“During an election year with a dizzying volume of immigration news, the most consequential related storyline is the central campaign promise from Donald Trump, which is backed by prominent voices in Congress: to deploy American troops in American communities to conduct a massive roundup, detention and purge of immigrants who have lived in America for decades, including Dreamers,” Cárdenas wrote.

“This mass deportation would rip apart American families, communities, and the economy in a way that impacts people across the country regardless of immigration status or direct connections to the foreign-born. We should take this mass deportation promise seriously and devote renewed attention to this potential catastrophe in the weeks and months ahead.”

Immigration advocates have grown increasingly frustrated with both the press and immigration-friendly politicians on both sides of the aisle, as attention has deviated from immigrants and their real effects on the U.S. economy and toward a relentless focus on the mechanics of migration, particularly the U.S-Mexico border.

The laser focus on border numbers has pushed Democrats and the Biden administration to support increasingly hawkish immigration proposals, including the failed bipartisan Senate border deal, drawing the spotlight away from Trump’s pledges to expand his first-term crackdown on immigrants.

“While Trump used similar rhetoric and deportation promises during his first campaign and his first term, we fear a potential Trump second administration would be prepared to actually enact this dystopian vision. Trump himself has detailed the specifics at rallies and in his recent Time magazine interview, and that is combined with detailed comments by Stephen Miller and the chilling details of the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025,’” Cárdenas wrote.

“The mass deportation plans are designed to stoke fear and are ready to start being implemented on day one of a second term.”

Attention on new migrant arrivals and day-to-day operations on the border has also blurred the lines in public perception of different groups of immigrants.

While some Republicans claim that up to 10 million new immigrants have arrived in the United States over the course of the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security estimates around 2.4 million people have been released into the country under one status or another, out of more than 6 million encounters between officials and migrants at the border.

Coverage of that new population often pools it with the around 11 million people who were already illegally living in the United States before the current global migration crisis, a majority of whom are of Mexican origin and have been in the country for more than a decade.

Trump’s proposals for mass deportations don’t make a distinction between the two groups either, and many Republicans have followed suit, openly supporting proposals to use the military to enact a mass deportation system.

“The prospect of hostile troops from red states rolling down the boulevards of blue cities, suburbs, and rural areas to forcibly remove millions of our neighbors, friends, teachers, and coworkers ought to be a persistent question posed to every candidate for every office — do you support this mass deportation vision?” Cárdenas wrote.

She added that, if enacted, such mass deportations would gut the labor force in a series of essential industries from agriculture to construction to home health care, dealing a blow to the overall U.S. economy.

And Cárdenas warned that the general population, while generally supportive of maintaining an orderly border, would react negatively to the sort of aggressive approach Trump is proposing.

“Americans would be repulsed by the authoritarian scenes of troops separating families. The visceral reaction across ideologies against Trump’s family separation during his first term provides the best model,” she wrote.

From Cárdenas’s perspective, Trump’s unorthodox promises — and the fact that they are ready to be implemented — are a weakness for Trump and Republicans in a general election campaign.

“Trump’s plans for mass-deportation are morally abhorrent, economically devastating, and politically disastrous for his campaign and his party. The more people hear about them — the more they take the threats of mass deportation seriously — the more Americans will be repulsed,” she wrote.

And Cárdenas advised Democrats to use that repulsion to their advantage.

“For Democrats, this can be a unifying message. The conflict between talking tough on the border and supporting legal immigration and legal status for immigrants can be difficult to manage, but the clear and ugly visions of a Trump second term present the opportunity to make plain the extreme and radical plan the GOP is embracing,” she continued.

“Democrats need to consistently and repeatedly call out the extremism – and the extreme consequences of – mass deportation. Political observers should take it seriously and it should be the central immigration focus of the 2024 campaign.”