Trump Won’t Tell You How He Takes Aim at Legal Immigration

Polls regularly find that most voters believe Donald Trump would handle immigration better than Kamala Harris. After three years of record migration levels that have strained some municipal budgets, even supporters of liberal immigration policies may understand why most voters hold that belief.

Regardless of where you stand on immigration, I can confidently tell you that, if elected, Harris would get more of her immigration reform agenda accomplished than Trump ever would.

That’s because the Republican’s immigration proposals are untethered to reality, while Harris has embraced a bipartisan compromise that could be enacted quickly if voters elect a cooperative Congress.

As President, Trump fell far short of his grandiose promises about curtailing illegal immigration. Where he was most successful is the part of his immigration agenda he avoids mentioning: curtailing legal immigration. Expect more of the same if he manages a return to the Oval Office. The blackened heart of Trump’s stated immigration agenda is mass deportation. “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” he said at this week’s Madison Square Garden rally.

That’s not the first time he’s made that pledge in this campaign. It’s not even the first campaign in which he’s made it.

Here’s Candidate Trump in 2016:

[T]here are at least 2 million … criminal aliens now inside of our country … We will begin moving them out … Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone. And you can call it deported if you want — the press doesn’t like that term. You can call it whatever the hell you want, they’re gone. Beyond the 2 million, and there are vast numbers of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled. But their days have run out in this country. The crime will stop. They’re going to be gone. It will be over.

The figure of two million supposedly “criminal” aliens is short of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in America in 2016, a number that is basically the same today. But deporting two million people would almost surely be a record-high mass deportation.

Trump cites the offensively named Operation Wetback operation under President Dwight Eisenhower as inspiration. Government statistics put Ike’s deportations at 2.1 million, but the consensus of historians is that the number is highly inflated by double-counting and voluntary, and sometimes temporary, departures. Better estimates put the 1950s deportation at between 250,000 and 800,000. (A second component of Eisenhower’s program was doubling the size of the legal migrant worker program, which previously deported workers could join.)

A CATO Institute comparison of interior deportations in the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump administrations found that Bush removed about one million undocumented immigrants and Obama about 1.2 million over their respective eight years in office.

And Trump? 325,660.

Granted, he had half the time as Bush or Obama, but he greatly trailed their pace and came in about 1.7 million short of his “Day One” promise.

A June 2024 analysis by the Migration Policy Institute found that the Biden administration was on pace to match Trump’s overall deportation numbers but with more attention paid to the border and fewer interior removals.

Of course, Trump’s relatively small interior deportation numbers do not address the outsized cruelty of his immigration record. As my colleague Marc Novicoff has detailed, Trump’s so-called “zero tolerance” border-crossing policy led to 5,500 children being separated from their families, most heavily in the Spring of 2018.

But even this heartbreaking policy didn’t accomplish what Trump intended. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump looked closely at Trump’s “favorite chart,” which tracks monthly southwest border apprehensions. Despite the heavy spin Trump puts on it, apprehensions rose dramatically over Trump’s first three years in office, from a low of about 16,000 in April 2017 to around 144,000 in May 2019. Between that point and the onset of the pandemic, apprehensions dropped to around 35,000 by March 2020. They plummeted even further—nearly 17,000 in April 2020—as Trump asserted “Title 42” public health emergency powers that expedited removals. But they began to rise again in Trump’s last months, reaching 78,000 in January 2021.

Where Trump was most successful in office was not in limiting illegal immigration but legal immigration.

Trump does not readily acknowledge his interest in slashing legal immigration. His platform makes no mention of reducing legal levels, only that “Republicans will prioritize Merit-based immigration, ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our Society and Economy, and never become a drain on Public Resources.” (All weird capitalization is from the original document.) Earlier this month, he even told the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which is supportive of immigration, “I want a lot of people to come in, but I want them to come in legally.”

But his record does not match the rhetoric. CATO tabulated that “the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non-immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020.” Much of the drop in green cards came during the pandemic when issuances “virtually ended.” Before then, according to the Washington Post, other attempts by Trump to limit green cards “were blocked by Congress or the courts.” Yet he still “frustrated immigrants and their lawyers by insisting on extra vetting that slowed visa processing, including for some high-skilled immigrants and their families.”

And Novicoff reported that “Trump slashed the refugee ceiling by 80 percent, reducing the numbers of refugees we accept by more than 65,000 per year.” (Refugees, unlike border-crossing asylum-seekers, are heavily vetted for years before winning approval for permanent resettlement in the United States.)

Trump’s unfulfilled promises regarding illegal immigration have been overlooked since the surge in asylum-seeking hit record levels on Joe Biden’s watch, with apprehensions peaking at about 300,000 last December. However, since Biden imposed strict border rules through an executive order, those numbers have plummeted to about 100,000 in September.

The sorts of questions often posed to Kamala Harris—If your administration couldn’t get it done in the last three-and-a-half years, why should we believe you could do it in the next four? What took your administration so long to crack down on the border? —apply to Trump as well. If he couldn’t deport two million undocumented immigrants in his first term, let alone 11 million, why should we believe he could in a second? Why did it take him so long to stop a surge in border crossings, and why was his reduction only temporary despite using emergency powers?

It’s not as if his published platform contains many policy details explaining how his approach would be different. The document casually promises a radical militarization, moving “thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border,” but doesn’t say precisely how many or from what overseas installations. It previews the “largest deportation program in American history” without any details of what agencies would carry it out and at what cost, although Stephen Miller, Trump’s former White House adviser, head of America First Legal, and the ex-president’s muse on immigration matters, has said it would involve using the National Guard. A recent CBS News report said deporting one million people could cost $88 billion. When CBS asked Trump’s immigration adviser, Tom Homan, for a written deportation plan, he said he was unaware of one.

As with Trump’s previous “zero-tolerance” policy, any attempt at mass deportation would inflict real harm. The pro-immigration group FWD.us reports that 28.2 million residents live in a mixed-status immigrant family, and one in three Latino families would be at risk of family separation. Trump is likely to inflict harm on individuals but unlikely to meet his stated policy goals.

In stark contrast, Harris has a detailed plan ready to go: the Senate bipartisan border security bill negotiated between Republican James Lankford, Democrat Chris Murphy, and Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema. The plan would fund more border agents to help limit illegal crossings, better technology to detect fentanyl, and additional immigration judges to help process the backlog of asylum cases. If Democrats win the House and keep the Senate, attracting enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster could be mathematically possible.

This week, I wrote about how Kamala Harris Would Get More Done Than Donald Trump, based on Trump’s limp record of accomplishment thanks to his aversion to bipartisan dealmaking while in office and Harris’s emphasis on bipartisanship on the campaign trail. Despite Trump’s immigration fixation, Harris is better poised to enact lasting border security measures without inflicting needless harm.

The post Trump Won’t Tell You How He Takes Aim at Legal Immigration appeared first on Washington Monthly.