The Devil Is in the Details

How will mass deportations actually work? We're starting to get an idea

The devil is in the details. That old chestnut.

And like most old chestnuts, it’s true. People generally don’t keep chestnuts they don’t need.

Donald Trump has his grand immigration policy, with the mass deportation of twenty-something-million illegals as its centerpiece.

But the question remains: How is he actually going to do it? What will such an operation look like in practical terms?

It’s early days, I know, but these are questions that are better faced now rather than later. Twenty million is a lot of people to deport, and four years isn’t actually a lot of time. Hell, it feels like only yesterday when Trump was coming down that escalator for the first time…

And, as we also know, nothing like this—not even Operation Wetback—has been done before. This will be ten or twenty times what Wetback was.

Thankfully, it seems pretty clear already that Trump is paying attention to the details.

Trump has shown, for one thing, that he’s deadly serious about personnel.

Personnel were the biggest problem of Trump’s first term. Trump’s popular appeal, of course, was as an outsider, a non-politician. He stood apart from the swamp and was largely free of its taint, but when he had to wade in, many of the people he chose to guide him through that unfamiliar territory—Bolton, Barr, Kushner, Pence, Pompeo—turned out to be lousy guides, if not deliberate deceivers who took the president into places where the mud was deepest and the tangle thickest, to prevent him from moving at all. They largely succeeded.

Trump has acknowledged this mistake of judgment himself, and his pointed rejection of roles for Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo in his administration was a deliberate message for the doubters—and the betrayers themselves—that he would not be making the same mistake again.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Immigration. I chose “deadly” back there for good reason. There are few men in US politics or government who look more deadly than Trump’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan. There’s a man I’d rather not be thrown into a pit with and have to subdue with my bare hands for the amusement of a bloodthirsty crowd. That’s an evaluation every man makes of his fellow men at some point, and frankly I wouldn’t fancy my chances with Tom, raw eggs or no.

It was widely hoped that Trump would choose Homan to be his border supremo. Homan was head of ICE during Trump’s first term and presided over the “controversial” family-separation policy that had liberals crying more than any of the families the policy was actually applied to. But Homan showed himself to be invulnerable to the corrosive effects of liberal lachrymation, and his stance has only hardened in the intervening years as the nation’s border crisis has worsened.

Since his appointment last month, Homan has come out swinging.

He’s put the Mexican cartels on blast, promising them a fate that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those Sicario movies (guns and drones and Blackhawks and SOF dudes with heads like doorstops). He’s put liberal mayors on blast. The UN and NGOs and the charity organizations that have been helping migrants cross the border and giving them prepaid credit cards—he’s put them on blast too.

He’s put everyone on blast: everyone who has already indicated their interest in disrupting Trump’s plans for mass deportations.

A guy like Tom Homan is definitely good to have around when a lot of different people need scaring at the same time.

Trump’s also made other important announcements in the last few days. He’s just picked two seasoned veterans to lead important agencies involved in border security and immigration. Customs and Border Protection will be led by Rodney Scott, and ICE will be led by Caleb Vitello. This is great news. Two men who have decades of combined experience under their belts, know their way around the agencies that will be implementing Trump’s immigration policies, and are well liked and respected by their colleagues.

So: very good. I’d struggle not to give Trump an “A” for all that.

But what else? How will the deportation thing actually work on the ground?

Details in this regard are fairly sketchy at this point.

We’ve had talk of large-scale processing facilities and door-to-door raids, using targeted data to identify illegals in their homes and places of work. There are huge amounts of data that will allow the identification and location of illegals with great precision.

But beyond that, we haven’t heard much.

One place we can look for a good example of how mass deportation might work is Missouri. In Missouri, Republican lawmakers are already moving to put in place incentives that will encourage the general public to take an active role in the deportation process. This is good.