Mass Deportation Is Fascism

We need to recognize the plan for what it is and call out its likely horrific consequences.

Photo from Jamie Dupree on Twitter / X

Of all the things I’ve seen come out of the Republican convention, these placards are the most chilling.

They refer to one of Donald Trump’s key promises: mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. That’s at least 10, maybe even as high as 20, million people. 

It’s hard for the human brain to wrap itself around such a huge number, which is partly the point. To put some context to this, the policy would impact some 1 in 20 households in America where there is at least one undocumented immigrant living there.

This policy, if implemented as promised, would cause massive disruptions to our economy, a subject I am covering later in a video with Prof. Robert Reich. Suffice it to say here that undocumented immigrants make up a huge percentage of the essential workers in our economy, performing jobs few Americans want, from picking our crops, to caring for our sick, to hauling our trash. Deporting them or forcing them into hiding would disrupt our supply chains, our food distribution, our construction and manufacturing, and critical services, just as we are recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

In today’s piece, I want to discuss the humanitarian nightmare this would create. Specifically, I will highlight how Trump is using “mass deportation” as part of a fascist playbook. If implemented, mass deportation would create a dystopian hellscape that few would recognize in modern America.

Dehumanization is the goal

Fascism depends on the elevation of a specific national identity, such as the imagined MAGA past when America was once “great.” By definition, this cherished identity excludes any who aren’t part of that vision. Often that means LGBTQs, the disabled, and ethnic minorities. Because this national identity is closely tied to patriarchal Christian Nationalist ideals, it often also includes feminists, communists and Jews. 

Trump chose to target immigrants, specifically immigrants who are brown or Black.

In his very first candidate speech in 2015, Trump claimed without basis that Mexican migrants were “bringing drugs, and bringing crime,” adding that “they’re rapists.” And recently, he claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country—a direct call out to Hitler’s rhetoric.

Trump’s promise of “mass” deportation underscores this dehumanization. He wants his Americans not to think of migrants as individual people. Rather, they’re an undifferentiated “mass” of bodies. An individual who is unjustly detained, such as Nelson Mandela or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has greater visibility and legal rights. But nameless, faceless masses of people, as we saw in Nazi Germany death camps and in U.S. internment camps, have none.

The government as oppressor

I worked with George Takei for many years as the composer and lyricist of Allegiance, a show about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans that premiered on Broadway in 2015. What struck me most about the story was how fascism had already come to America and been visited upon many minority groups—Native Americans, African Americans, and then Japanese Americans.

American fascism is not much different than its European counterpart. It involves a powerful state bent on the subjugation of a whole class of people within its borders, utilizing all the tools at its disposal. At the outset of the campaign against Japanese Americans following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, ambitious politicians demonized the Japanese within America, not only blaming them unfairly for the attack but suggesting that all of them were now suspected saboteurs and none could be differentiated or trusted.

That opened the door to policies that began to restrict the civic lives of Japanese Americans, in an echo of what Nazi Germany had done with its Jewish population. Their bank accounts were frozen, their travel restricted, and eventually even a curfew imposed from dusk to dawn. The moment that launched the evacuation and internment of 120,000 people came as Executive Order, No. 9066. That was issued by a Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proving that no party is immune from fascism’s horrific excesses.

The U.S. military became a tool of oppression, deployed to forcibly relocate all those of “Japanese descent” from the West Coast to ten different barbed wire internment camps. They were located in some of the most desolate and forsaken parts of the country and guarded by soldiers in turrets, guns pointing in. Two-thirds of those held, for years without charge or trial, were U.S. Citizens.

The courts acted in cahoots with the Executive, with the U.S. Supreme Court signing off on the evacuation and internment and finding in the infamous Korematsu case that military necessity trumped the civil rights of those unjustly incarcerated. In her recent and scathing dissent to Donald Trump v. United States, which granted the president presumptive immunity for all actions taken within his official capacity, Justice Sonya Sotomayor specifically cited Korematsu, once seen as a low point in our jurisprudence, as a warning for what a president so empowered might do. With a green light from the Supreme Court to test the bounds of executive authority without fear of prosecution, Trump will be free to order whatever policy he pleases when it comes to deporting undocumented migrants.

I lay all this out because we are at the beginning of a next dark chapter in U.S. history should Trump return to the White House. This time around, however, he will have the full weight of the administrative state behind him, one perverted by the execution of Project 2025 as well as a compliant Supreme Court.

Raids, detention camps, and a militarized border

Trump and the GOP are presently trying to soft-pedal the idea of mass deportations, saying they will start by deporting the “criminals,” but we shouldn’t be fooled. 

First, there is no evidence that the migrant population is full of criminals emptied from prisons in foreign countries. Studies show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native-born, and that undocumented migrants commit even fewer. This stands to reason. Because the penalties for crimes by the undocumented include deportation, that acts as an additional deterrent to criminal activity.

Second, to carry out any kind of “mass” deportation, the U.S. government would need to enlist the help of local authorities in apprehending suspected undocumented persons. This opens the door to all manner of horrors: raiding homes, cordoning off neighborhoods, establishing checkpoints, asking to see papers, separating families, and hauling people off to camps, all without due process. 

It’s critical to note that many of those Trump wants to deport are the chief wage earners for their families. That means we are talking not only about the cruel separation of children from their parents and senior relatives in one out of every 20 families, but also about deportations that would immediately impoverish millions of families with children.

While the majority of undocumented migrants originally come from Mexico, millions arrive from other countries, including the Caribbean, India and China. Those communities will similarly be horrifically impacted by Trump’s plan. Racial profiling would become commonplace, for example, or even a necessity in the eyes of authorities trying to arrest and deport millions. Legal immigrants from developing countries, and even U.S. citizens who share physical characteristics with undocumented immigrants, would need to carry identification with them at all times or risk being hauled off, their legal rights trammeled upon or ignored.

That would immediately establish a secondary class of citizens—those with brown skin, foreign features, accents or non-English surnames—who would need to worry any time they have any brush with the authorities. Many crimes, including thefts and domestic violence, would go unreported in minority neighborhoods, especially if there were concerns that the police might discover the presence of someone undocumented in the household. 

Indeed, the entire deportation campaign would also be ripe for abuse. Employers could use someone’s questionable legal status, or that of their loved one, as improper leverage. And given the numbers involved, authorities could decide to seize first and ask questions later. Those swept up in raids likely would be required to prove that they were wrongfully arrested or deported but might have no effective channels to do so. With millions of apprehensions, it’s not hard to imagine many disappearing into the system, with inadequate legal safeguards to prevent mistreatment or wrongful deportation.

None of this would resemble any kind of America we would recognize today. But it all follows logically from a program whose goal is to deport 10-15 million undocumented immigrants in a short amount of time.

Many Latino voters have been slow to fully back the Democratic ticket, largely because of the economic impacts of inflation on their households including the spiraling costs of housing and education. But we have an opportunity now, especially in the wake of the GOP’s bashing of immigrants at their national convention last night, to educate voters about the existential threat that Trump’s mass deportation plan poses to Latino communities and families.