United States President-elect Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he plans to use the U.S. military to carry out his proposed mass deportation operation, an initiative that could result in millions of immigrants being sent to Mexico.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump shared a Nov. 8 post by the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, who, citing “reports,” wrote that the incoming Trump administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Above the post he shared on his personal account in the early hours of Monday morning, Trump wrote: “TRUE!!!”
The former and soon-to-be president of the United States stated during the presidential election campaign that he planned to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” but until Monday he hadn’t indicated that he would use the military to execute it.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Trump was “expected to mobilize agencies across the U.S. government to help him deport record numbers of immigrants.”
As president, Trump will have the authority to declare a national emergency to support his deportation operation, thus “unlocking standby powers that include redirecting funds lawmakers had appropriated for other purposes,” The New York Times reported.
“During his first term, … Mr. Trump invoked this power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had been willing to authorize,” the newspaper said.
The Times also reported that “one major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.”
However, it noted that Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, said in late 2023 that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.
The news website Axios reported that “Trump’s mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families” across the United States.
There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, a significant number of whom are Mexican. Former foreign affairs minister and current Environment Minister Alicia Bárcena said in February that there were 5.3 million undocumented Mexicans living in the United States.
In addition to Mexicans, the United States could attempt to deport nationals of other countries, such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans, to Mexico.
Citizens of those nations “are sometimes unable to be deported to their origin countries for diplomatic reasons,” The New York Times reported.
Mexico ‘must be ready’ for mass deportations, but is it?
Mariana Aparicio Ramírez, a National Autonomous University (UNAM) academic and member of the Observatory of the Mexico-United States Binational Relationship, said in an interview with the newspaper El Financiero that “Mexico must be ready for arrests [of immigrants in the United States] and the mass return of Mexicans and other latinos.”
“Trump has the support of the citizens and that means that what is politically incorrect can be politically viable,” she said.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has pledged to “defend” Mexican migrants at risk of deportation, and advised them to seek advice or assistance at Mexican consulates in the United States.
Sheinbaum, who spoke to Trump by telephone two days after his Nov. 5 election victory, hopes that Mexican officials can meet with the incoming president’s transition team before he takes office on Jan. 20 to put forward a case against mass deportations.
The United States economy would inevitably suffer from the deportation of a large number of workers, a point Mexican officials would likely raise with members of Trump’s team.
Nevertheless, it appears likely that Mexico will receive a significant number of deportees during Trump’s second term as president, if not the millions he has promised to expel.
As Mexico News Daily reported earlier this month in an article on what a second Trump presidency will mean for Mexico, the Mexican economy — currently slowing — could struggle to provide jobs for large numbers of deportees who suddenly find themselves in Mexico after being uprooted from their lives in the U.S.
The Washington Post reported last week that migrant advocates in Mexico “are alarmed at what’s coming,” noting that they have said that “sending millions of jobless Mexicans back to towns they left years ago could create chaos in areas already suffering from poverty and organized crime.”
The Post spoke to two men who run migrant shelters on the Mexico-U.S. border for an article it headlined “Trump promised mass deportations. Mexico isn’t ready.”
“Neither the shelters nor the border area nor Mexico are ready for this,” Héctor Silva, a Protestant pastor who runs the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, told the Post.
Migrant shelters in Mexico’s border cities already struggle to accommodate migrants who make the long and dangerous journey through the country in their attempt to reach the United States.
Francisco Gallardo, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Matamoros, another border city in Tamaulipas, told the Post that “no one is prepared for deportations” of the magnitude Trump has spoken about.
“Neither the governments nor the civil society organizations,” he said.
Adam Isacson, a migration analyst and director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said that deportees to Mexico “will be thrown into a new kind of poverty” because they won’t be able to find jobs with wages comparable to those they earned in the United States.
That situation “will make them more desperate,” he said.
Deportees could even be tempted to work for organized crime groups in Mexico, one of the largest employers in the country, according to a 2023 study.
One person who is less concerned about Mexico’s capacity (or lack thereof) to absorb large numbers of deportees is Arturo Rocha, a former senior immigration official in Mexico.
“We are prepared to receive large numbers; we have done this before,” he told the Post. “But the key question is, how massive will massive deportations be?”
Sheinbaum, who also faces the task of defusing Trump’s tariff threats, appears optimistic — or at least hopeful — that the number of immigrants deported won’t be as high as the incoming U.S. president has said it will be.
Asked last week about the potential impact of deportations on remittances to Mexico, Sheinbaum simply said, “We hope there is no impact,” i.e. that no, or virtually no, Mexican immigrants are deported.
For his part, Trump’s incoming “border czar” Thomas Homan said in October that deportations during the second Trump administration wouldn’t be “a mass sweep of neighborhoods” to detain undocumented immigrants.
“It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous. It’ll be concentrated. They’ll be targeted arrests,” he said.
With reports from Axios, The New York Times, El Financiero and The Washington Post
They should only deport migrants who have caused problems, like criminal offenses. That’s who they need to target. Why deport folks working everyday, and have been for decades. That’s where this incoming administration is making a grave mistake.
And they need to sweep up all the ones from India and China who are in no position to think they need asylum from their home country.
If they don’t use some common sense in this matter, they can expect some major protests on both sides of the border and throughout the USA.
Sorry, but they need to deport all who entered the country illegally. Many of them are either living free at the expense of US taxpayers or taking jobs away from American citizens. They have inflated the cost of housing and cause huge expenditures to educate their children and provide them medical care. Take a look at what would happen to Americans if they moved en mass to Mexico!
Fox news much?
Millions of US citizens already live in Mexico.
I was confused about the numbers – Trump is saying 20 million migrants will be deported but there’s only an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. Where are the other 9 million coming from? Then I heard Thomas Homan say in a recent interview that he is in favor of revoking the citizenship of naturalized Americans if their parents were in the US illegally at the time of their birth. Can you imagine deporting people to Mexico who aren’t even citizens of Mexico? People who may have never been to Mexico and may not even speak the language. Can you imagine if they have married a US citizen and they have children? What a nightmare!
It was done before in the 1920s I think, where do you think all the land for public schools in California came from? Yes, land of the free haha
Trump and his supporters will “cut off thier noses to spite their faces” if they carryout this cruel and gargantually expensive threat. The US was buit off the backs of slave and undocumented labor. Undocumented immigrants pay sales taxes and contribute to the local economies. They’re paying into Social Security keeping it afloat even though they will never see a penny. The results will cost both the US and Mexico immeaureable damage on several levels for decades to come.
You are absolutely correct. Trump failed at every business he ever touched and filed bankruptcy 6 times. He doesn’t care if he bankrupts America too. He’s not an intelligent or rational person.
Newsflash…America has been bankrupt for decades. Level up!
He is senile, a cocktail with felon, rapist and racist. Watch out American , Trump is worst than fentanyl. The Bible says that he who lives by the word, dies by the sword.
They are talking about all the people who entered the country during the Biden/kamala administration. Not only Mexicans but people from all over the world.
We seem to have forgotten that most of the western U.S. once belonged to Mexico. It was taken with no regard for the Mexicans who were residents in the U.S. before any U.S. citizens had reached this area of the United States. How easily and quickly we forget we forget our transgressions! Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
This is the exchange copy of the treaty, written in both Spanish and English. This copy, given to the United States by Mexico, provides proof that the treaty was ratified by the Mexican government.
View All Pages in the National Archives Catalog
View Transcript
This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims to Texas, and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States.
Marianne, The United States fought and won a war. They didn’t just “take land”. Mexico lost. That’s what happens.
Mexico let them through, no problem taking them back. Right?
That Mexico’s failure to secure its side of the border is an undeniable fact. In Mexico’s defense, the Democrat Party’s deliberate opening of that border and inviting people to flood in from all over with no vetting or even minimal screening for disease made Mexico’s job had they really undertaken it virtually impossible.
The recent U.S. election sends a signal the public there has had enough of the Democrat open border. Mexico needs to heed that signal and send its own signal that it is fully aware the game has changed.
Sheinbaum’s apparent threat to Mexico’s legal and economically lucrative immigrant community is certainly not sending the right message. If you want to talk about cutting one’s nose off to spite the face it is hard to find a better example.
Mexico’s #1 trading partner is the U.S. and Mexico enjoys a trade and remittance surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Someone needs to wake up and smell the coffee in Mexico City before they cause a trade and immigration war they can’t possibly win.
Trump is not talking about just sending back any immigrants who came through under the Biden administration, but millions that came in before (including his administration; did none make it across during those 4 years) and not just sending Mexicans back, but those who enjoy “diplomatic circumstances” like Venezuelans and Cubans. I work with documented asylum seeking immigrants and have never met a Mexican asylum seeker, because most who migrate do not get preferential treatment. So Mexico will now have to take care of the nationals of other countries? Already there are homeless Haitians in CDMX. As Porfirio Diaz said, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States”!!
Mexico let in millions across the Guatemala border, and now complains because the US doesn’t want to pay for them. Hypocrites.
$63 billion USD remittance in 2023
while I agree 100% that Mexico is partly responsible for the immigration crisis in the US by simply allowing every other country to use Mexico as a staging ground to illegally enter the USA, crossing Mexico unimpeded by its government was and is wrong. I see the US government targeting the criminal elements from many countries, the Mexican immigrants (many very hard-working, law-abiding folks) are wrongly painted with the same brush. I am sure when the criminal elements and people from other countries are removed, the deportations will slow to a trickle as the Mexican immigrant workers are needed and wanted in the US labor force
Why is there no mention of migratory Canadians in this article?
Because their skin is white?
The first of deportations, once a convicted illegal person serves their time in jail, they should immediately deported back to their country and banned from entering the USA for life.
If caught again entering the USA, give them 20 years of hard labor just like the Military System
Undocumented and green card people who are convicted of felonies who complete their terms or are given parole are usually transported straight from jail or prison to a detention facility and sent to their country of birth, even if they were brought to the US as children and don’t speak the language.
The Media (THAT’s YOU MND!!!) needs to stop using the term “undocumented” unless that is correct and specific to the person’s situation. Very, very few people are actually undocumented and lack papers. Almost all immigrants in the USA (legal and illegal) are documented. Their documents simply state they are nationals/citizens/residents of another country.
Sheinbaum, don’t wait till January 20th. start setting up “tents” in the main plaza (Zocalo) for all the migrants coming to Mexico. Don’t wait, start “planning” right now “with your administration. Ask AMLO to help you since he was the one that allowed all of these “illegals” to come across Mexico without stopping them. Get AMLO out of retirement to assist you in this big, massive “welcome back ceremony” back to Mexico. “Tents” don’t cost much and are easy to “set-up” at all the “parks” are perfect for temporary r housing for the “illegals” until Mexico can send them back to their own country (Guatemala, Honduras. San Salvador, Venezuela, China, and etc.). It pays to plan ahead of the rush and to be ready. Good luck with all your effort.
1.3 million illegals already have deportation orders, Biden just hasn’t enforced it, so those will the be the first along with the 13,000 that are already in ICE detention. Then they will go after all the criminals first and the ones affiliated with the gangs, drugs, trafficking and others. The average person who has been in the country for a time period shouldn’t be worried. Get ready Tom Holman and his agency are going to come at it with full force, as THAT’S WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE JUST VOTED FOR!!!!