The Boundless Destruction of Donald Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan

JD Vance made his opinion very clear during the vice presidential debate: Immigrants are to blame for almost all of the country’s ills, including the housing crisis. He and Donald Trump have proposed a solution: mass deportation, which they believe would “ease demand” and lower prices.

This is hardly their first foray into what could loosely be called “housing policy”—Trump and Vance have proposed building on federal lands, as well as rounding up unhoused Americans and putting them in camps outside of metropolitan areas. But the mass deportation plan is something the GOP ticket has been starting to push for in recent weeks, and so it is now the pair’s main housing proposal. Needless to say, this is not some abstract price-lowering tool; there’s no wonkery at work here. Rather, it’s red meat for a ravenous MAGA base in the form of a violent expulsion of people from their homes.

The broader implication is that this will be done in order to let others move into the now-empty homes of the recently expelled. Trump and Vance haven’t yet described the mechanism by which this housing transfer is effected. But given the fact that those targeted for deportation currently occupy homes—as opposed to living in homeless shelters or on the streets—the clear implication is that the residences of the expelled would come to be occupied by people who Trump and Vance prefer. In other words, it would give the people Trump and Vance see as their in-group some “living space,” if you will. It’s settler colonialism from within, or more accurately, an American lebensraum. It’s an evil idea. It also won’t work.

By and large, the media has treated a plan that boils down to mass theft as a legitimate policy idea, worthy of being the “other side” of the housing debate. During the vice presidential debate, CBS showed a prepared graphic that elevated mass deportation as one more banal housing proposal, as if it was a good-faith argument instead of an economy-cratering act of moral derangement. Vance’s refusal to admit Trump lost the 2020 election served as the big headline moment of the debate; despite the media’s voracious demand for policy detail, the mass deportation plan ended up not seizing much attention.

It’s worthy of more scrutiny. Even if it weren’t freighted with alarming amounts of bigotry, this is what purports to be the Republican ticket’s serious response to a complicated crisis that affects every state in the nation. “Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” Vance said with a straight face to viewers. That’s not true, but according to the Trump-Vance deportation-as-housing plan, kicking people out of the country would free up so many homes for the rest of the people in the United States that it would significantly lessen the crisis of housing affordability and the limited supply of homes.

However it might affect demand in the short term, it’s a poor excuse to justify an act of mass violence against immigrants that this party is determined to carry out regardless of whether there is some economic issue to which it can be tenuously tethered.

More to the point, this ticket doesn’t actually have a sincere idea to actually alleviate the housing crisis. Mass deportations would do nothing to increase construction of new homes, address the lack of affordable housing, or address the widespread economic inequality that prevents ordinary people from saving money—not just for some potential slice of the American dream, but with the high costs of living in the America they have. The Republicans’ radical ideas actually reveal a paucity of understanding how the real world works and what can be done to bring about real prosperity. Actually investing in housing and tackling systemic issues that make living in America so expensive aren’t on the agenda. But the raising of spectral enemies to blame for the lack of abundance definitely is.

Naturally, anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump campaign is hardly novel. It’s been part of Trump’s message since 2015; he’s called for mass deportation repeatedly, long before his supporters waved professionally made “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the Republican National Convention. What’s different now is how housing is folded into his promised purge. Trump had previously talked about denying mortgages to immigrants; now he’s pushing to simply kick them out—and if any of them have housing, to essentially seize it and give it away. And the campaign is hinting that they don’t plan on making much distinction between undocumented immigrants and legal U.S. citizens disfavored by the right.

From mass deportation to “remigration,” these proposals stand out as more radical than that now-infamous collection of far-right ideas known as Project 2025—the policy manifesto written by several ex-Trump officials and conservative leaders (with a foreword by Vance from before he was Trump’s running mate). That document outlines several housing policies. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson argued in the Project 2025 chapter on housing for massively scaling back HUD’s expenditures, tacking on greater work requirements for people to receive assistance, and eliminating the Housing Supply Fund, a HUD program set up to deal with the nation’s housing shortage.

Project 2025 also exposes the need to abandon “housing first” policies, which are about prioritizing getting people into housing as the primary way to help protect people from the risks and compounding challenges that come from being unhoused. The approach, which still has challenges tied with the lack of housing in the country, is favored by service providers, advocates for unhoused Americans, and the federal government. Eliminating housing first as a strategy is something Vance has also pushed for in Congress.

Trump and Vance, however, have been looking for inspiration further afield than Beltway think tanks. Imperialist and fascist governments have famously endeavored to displace people, seizing homes and businesses and redistributing them to favored groups. If a big part of the solution to the housing crisis is having fewer people fight over existing housing, then it’s unclear how the suddenly vacated homes of people forced out of the country would be redistributed. If a second Trump administration was somehow able to carry out this plan, how would this insidious and callous redistribution of living space be carried out? Considering Trump and his allies want to cut HUD and other social services, it’s likely to create the kind of administrative system fascist regimes have set up in the past when they gave away looted property.

But their plan’s immorality is only matched by its stupidity. Nothing about mass deportation solves the housing crisis, either the reality for people currently struggling or the ongoing root causes that keep people spending disproportionate amounts of their income on rent or, in increasing numbers, living on the streets. The supporting evidence that Vance offered in his debate amounts to a brief comment from a single Federal Reserve governor; even there, no hard figures are on offer.

What is indisputable is that there is a housing shortage. Studies put the country short by approximately four million homes, and according to federal data for 2023, more than 653,000 Americans experience homelessness. Vance is right that demand is high. Considering how much the construction industry relies on immigrant labor for projects such as new housing, a worker shortage would mean a major slowdown in construction of new units, putting more demand on the already limited supply. And while a sudden massive drop in demand might briefly lower prices, it would likely also crash the American economy. That’s all in addition to the abominable amount of violence and chaos that would arise from attempts to enact that policy, which would no doubt unspool in a way that brings on a slew of unintended economic consequences.

A recent report from the American Immigration Council hints at the broad and deleterious knock-on effects of the mass deportation proposal:

In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total … is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people.

Among the other eye-popping estimates furnished by the report are an estimated loss of gross domestic product between 4.2 and 6.8 percent and shortfalls in federal tax revenues to the tune of $46.8 billion (plus an additional hit to state and local coffers estimated to be near $29.3 billion, as well as $22.6 billion worth of losses to Social Security and a additional $5.7 billion to Medicare). Added to that economic mayhem would be “significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector.” Those losses would spiral out into negative outcomes for everyone: “As industries suffer,” reads the report, “hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs.”

What of the other Trump-Vance housing policy ideas? Trump has repeatedly stated a desire to build housing on federal lands, but those are often found far outside of the urban centers where jobs are more prevalent and more housing is needed. Trump also wants to “change regulations,” according to his platform, but if the past is any guide, his zeal for regulatory amendment more often runs in the direction of constraining, not expanding, the housing supply: He’s spoken at length in opposition to updating or changing zoning rules that might add housing stock where it’s needed.

Needless to say, nothing in either the Trump-Vance agenda or in Project 2025 actually addresses the root causes of homelessness. There’s no focus on incentives to help lower construction costs or get developers to build affordable housing. With means testing and increased burdens for assistance, combined with cuts to social services, people on the verge of homelessness likely will end up without a home, only increasing demand. Keep in mind that Trump, Vance, and their allies behind Project 2025 claim homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental health issues, not cost of living challenges and the lack of affordable housing. The policy also doesn’t address the types of housing in this country. More housing can lower the overall cost of apartments and homes, yes, but there is a reason developers call certain types of units low-income or luxury spaces.

It’s really not worth pretending that Trump and Vance have regulatory solutions to offer: If they aren’t proposing new construction, zoning updates, increased federal subsidies, or even reining in real estate speculation, then all we’re left with is magical thinking—and mass deportation. How many Americans would be OK taking over stolen homes? It’s a question that no one’s thought to ask, despite the fact that it’s literally what the Trump proposal is.

The widespread banishment of tens of millions of people isn’t going to make luxury apartment buildings suddenly cheap or provide expensive McMansions to working-class people. And while neither Trump nor Vance have discussed the matter, it’s unlikely that the poor and unhoused people they hope to move to essentially internment camps outside of cities would then be transitioned into these now-vacant homes. Mass deportation will only lead to suffering and theft—economic ruin and moral rot. You’d have to be an idiot or a scoundrel to treat it as a valid housing plan.