By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
A strange thing about the presidential campaign we just endured is how many people rationalized their support for Donald Trump by arguing that he wouldn’t make good on some of his central promises.
“I think mass deportation is just talk, but the era of open borders will be over,” Scott McConnell, a co-founder of The American Conservative, wrote on the social platform X. In July, a Mexican-born Trump backer told The New York Times, “Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?”
Now the answer is taking shape: He’s going to oversee a militarized mass roundup of immigrants in the country illegally. On Sunday, Trump named Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar.”
In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no immigrant in the country illegally would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.
Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest immigrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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