What Trump’s victory means for immigration and mass deportation in the US

Throughout President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign he made it clear one of his first priorities would be mass deportations of undocumented migrants.
Now that the election is decided, border agents, locals leaders and law enforcement are wondering how this could all work.
“With the current resources that are allocated to ICE, he can get nowhere near the kind of numbers he’s been talking about, you know, a million deportations in a year,” said John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE.
During the entire first Trump administration, ICE carried out around 1.5 million deportations.
In order to ramp up that number, Trump has proposed tapping local law enforcement officials to carry out the deportations.
David Hathaway is the Sheriff for Santa Cruz County in Arizona, which features the largest ports of entry with Mexico of any border County in the state.
“The courts have already ruled in Arizona that this is unconstitutional, that local police cannot be enforcing immigration law. It’s a separate thing. It’s a federal thing,” said Hathaway.
States like Texas, Arizona, Iowa and Oklahoma have all passed legislation to extend the limits of what local authorities can do to curb illegal immigration.
The implementation of these laws, though, are all currently held up in federal court.
Despite legal challenges, Sheriff David Rhodes, president of the Arizona Sheriffs Association, says these kinds of laws are necessary.
“The voters of Arizona, they voted for this expecting some kind of action and I believe we as elected leaders need to give it to them,” said Rhodes.
Hathaway says aside from his legal concerns, he believes carrying out mass deportations would terrorize communities like his.
“To do these mass deportation things, which would put anybody that looks like a migrant — It would put you in the crosshairs, even if you’re here with all your documents and everything like that. It would put that whole class of people in scrutiny,” said Hathaway.
According to the American Immigration Council, deporting one million immigrants per year would cost more than $88 billion annually.