President-elect Donald Trump ran on deporting millions of undocumented immigrants if he won a second term. And now that he prepares to enter the White House in January, his incoming administration has promised that mass deportations will be at the top of his mind from day one.
Reuters reported earlier this week that Trump's plan to deport a significant portion of the 13 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States would cost roughly $968 billion over a 10-year period. This includes the cost of hiring untold thousands of additional Department of Homeland Security personnel to round up, detain and process targets of Trump's mass deportations, in addition to the construction cost of detention camps, immigration judges and other related costs.
However, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston told MSNBC host Joy Ann-Reid on Friday, there is another layer of cost to Trump's deportations that has yet to be fully considered. This isn't just due to the expected rise in food prices due to the agriculture industry's reliance on immigrant labor, but due to expected new taxes that will be a byproduct of Trump's mass deportations.
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"Not only are you going to pay a lot more for food and meat, but a lot of the people who came here without permission or with limited permission that Trump wants to remove have American-born children," Johnston said. "So we're not only going to separate these families but your property taxes are going to go up because they're going to have to put millions of children into foster care, into orphanages, and we're going to have to bear the bill for that through our property taxes or sales taxes."
"In addition, when children grow up in circumstances like that, the likelihood we will have mental health and criminal problems in the future," he continued. "So the cost of this are way beyond the estimates that focus on just deporting people, and of course, Donald Trump said it will be bloody. And I don't see how it can be anything but that."
Trump has said his deportation operation would be modeled after former President Dwight Eisenhower's "Operation Wetback," which is the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history to date. Though as History.com reported, the operation was sloppy and costly and resulted in many U.S. citizens being rounded up in the mass deportation of approximately 1.3 million people. And earlier this year, Tom Homan, who was his former ICE chief, has promised that he would "run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."
"They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025," Homan said at the National Conservatism Conference in July.
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Trump has previously promised to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to juice his deportation operation, as it would allow the U.S. military to be deployed on U.S. soil to round up and detain undocumented immigrants across the country. Journalist Eleanor Clift warned that doing so would almost certainly result in human rights violations and would pose a massive risk to the economy.
""If such a plan were carried out, it would cause enormous disruption to communities throughout the country and increase the weight of the federal government in people's lives in a way that runs counter to a political party that supposedly prides itself on small government," Clift wrote in June.
Watch Johnston's segment by clicking this link.
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