Donald Trump’s appointment of hard-liners to key immigration posts signals a determination to fulfill campaign pledges of mass deportations and border crackdowns, but it will be an uphill battle, analysts say.
Illegal immigration was a key issue for voters in the US election, and Trump’s promises to seal the border and carry out the largest deportation program in American history appeared to resonate at the ballot box.
Actually implementing campaign promises, however, could prove tricky, immigration experts say.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that with around 13-15 million undocumented migrants in the country — not over 20 million as Trump often says — mass deportation is “not realistic.”
Tens of thousands of new personnel would be required to staff hundreds of detention centers and courtrooms across the country, he said, all of it coming at an extraordinary financial and administrative cost.
“Our estimates were that it would take over a decade to (deport 13 million people),” he told AFP.
“That’s only presuming that Congress funds the government to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars to carry out those mass deportations.”
Never one to let practical matters stand in his way, the profile of Trump’s incoming team reveals a certain determination on the part of the billionaire.
Just days after his stunning November 5 victory, a new “border czar” was among the very first officials he named.
Tom Homan was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term. He oversaw a controversial — and short-lived — policy that separated parents and children at the border.
The former police officer headed enforcement and removal operations at ICE under president Barack Obama.
Some Republicans initially viewed Homan as a bit soft, but Trump, after becoming president in 2017, lavished praise on him, saying approvingly that he “looks very nasty; he looks very mean.”
Homan contributed to the conservative Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for government overhaul, and he advocated in a speech this year for a sweeping deportation program.
“No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he told the National Conservatism Conference.
“If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
– ‘Muslim ban’ architect –
Homan will work alongside Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Secretary, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.
The 52-year-old is best known internationally for sinking her chances of being Trump’s vice-presidential pick with her cheerful admission that she shot her dog, Cricket, because it was “untrainable.”
Despite her state’s sizable distance from the Mexico border, Noem sent National Guardsmen to the frontier, earning plaudits from the Republican right.
After the announcement of her nomination, Noem said she was “honored and humbled.”
“We will secure the Border, and restore safety to American communities so that families will again have the opportunity to pursue The American Dream,” she said.
White House liaison on the issue looks set to fall to Stephen Miller, who Trump has named to the senior post of deputy chief of staff for policy.
Miller, one of the most visible members of the last Trump administration, is a 39-year-old who grew up in liberal Southern California, and who has cultivated a fiercely anti-immigrant reputation.
He is the man credited as the brains behind the so-called “Muslim ban” in 2017, which barred entry to the United States for people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Despite his family reportedly having escaped anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Miller was widely reported in 2019 to have pushed for the elimination of refugee admissions to the United States.
At a Trump campaign rally in Madison Square Garden — which critics compared to a 1939 pro-Nazi gathering at the same location — Miller told supporters: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
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