In an April 2024 interview with Time magazine, former President Donald Trump promised that, if re-elected to office, he would target "probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million" unauthorized aliens for deportation. On July 17, at the Republican National Convention, that promise was highlighted by Tom Homan, who had served as Trump's Acting Director of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE). Homan warned the millions of unauthorized aliens that “You better start packing now . . . because you’re going home.” Unmentioned by Homan (or by anyone else at the convention) was the one, easy, single step that would multiply by a large factor the number of unauthorized aliens who would “start packing”, perhaps because no one at the convention recalled that step.
During the final months of President Trump’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under the leadership of Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, drafted an Interim Final Rule that required nearly all U.S. employers to file online the Form I-9 that current law already requires them to complete for every newly hired alien and to store onsite for a period of years. The Interim Final Rule would enable DHS to promptly notify the employer whether the alien worker was legally eligible to work, significantly reducing the risk of the employer’s belatedly discovering that it had to fire a worker in whom it might have invested many dollars in training. This “G-Verify” (Government Verification) system, unlike "E-Verify" (Electronic Verification), would relieve the employer of the need to store the Form I-9 for many years.
The draft regulation arrived at the White House towards the end of 2020, at which time many in the White House staff were laser-focused on the president’s re-election campaign and challenging the validity of the election results. As a result of those distractions, a regulation that President Trump would almost certainly have signed off on, had it been brought to his attention before he left office, was left behind on someone’s White House desk, where it lay unattended for four years by a White House that showed little interest in enforcing any immigration law.
If implemented, G-Verify would likely result in the prompt dismissal of many if not most unauthorized workers. There is arguably nothing else that a re-elected President Trump could more readily do to get the millions "packing” than finding a pen to sign the G-Verify rule into law.