Among President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises, two face the stiffest challenges: ending the Ukraine war “in one day” and “mass deportation” of millions of illegal immigrants.
The practicality of a “one-day” ending of the war in Ukraine is hard to assess without greater detail on Mr. Trump’s plan. In contrast, assessing the costs and viability of “mass deportations” is easier because the U.S. government has considerable experience with deportation.
In 2017, when Mr. Trump first proposed mass deportations as president, the estimated number of unauthorized migrants was 10 million to 11 million. The Center for Migration Studies then calculated that deportations of that magnitude would require hiring thousands of new immigration agents, would cost “upwards of half a trillion dollars” and would take 20 years to complete.
Those figures would be considerably higher today given that, as the Center for Immigration Studies recently estimated, the number of unauthorized migrants likely exceeds 14 million. As explained below, those and more recent claims about the cost and time it would take to deport millions of migrants can now arguably be put aside because they fail to account for important new tools soon to be at Mr. Trump’s disposal.
. . .
To close this loophole, Mr. Trump’s DHS in 2020 drafted a proposed regulation (“G-Verify” for “Government-Verify”) mandating online filing of Form I-9. Although the proposed regulation was drafted too late in the year to be published, nothing stands in the way of its publication on the day Mr. Trump returns to office.
…