The same man who wholeheartedly believed that Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs also believes undocumented immigrants are on a sudden crime spree and should be deported from the country en masse. Former president Donald Trump has promised that he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. if he is elected as president. This is an outright sinister promise he has pulled out of his rear in a desperate attempt to win the election, and he refuses to acknowledge the greater implications of doing so.
Trump has falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “let in 13,099 convicted murderers” to the U.S. during her time in office. This metric has been stripped entirely of its context and maliciously misconstrued.
A letter from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that there were “more than 600,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges – including about 13,000 convicted of homicide.” What Trump will not tell the public is that the data dates back 40 years and that the Department of Homeland Security clarified that many of the 13,000 are already imprisoned.
The crime spree that Trump alleges immigrants have gone on is blown out of proportion as well. In actuality, “U.S.-born citizens were 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for committing weapons-related offenses, five times more likely for violent offenses, more than twice as likely for property crimes and nearly twice as likely for drug offenses,” according to a 2021 study from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The illusory truth effect has played a major role in the popularization of Trump’s blatant lies. “Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information,” and Trump has lied about the criminal status of immigrants at least 575 times, the crime immigrants cause at least 185 times and murders committed by immigrants at least 235 times. Trump attributes his stance on immigration to what led him to win the 2016 election, so he is doubling down by lying incessantly about immigration to win this year’s election.
Another false claim Trump has made is that deporting 11 million people will be easy. “We are going to get [undocumented immigrants] out. And the police know who they are. They are known by law enforcement,” Trump said.
Local law enforcement has no way of knowing who is and who is not an undocumented immigrant. There are no lists of the names of undocumented immigrants; they do not have serial numbers either.
If anything, deporting millions of people will overload the criminal justice and immigration detention systems. Hundreds of new detention facilities would need to be constructed and hundreds of thousands of new immigration agents, judges and staff would need to be hired. Should Trump get elected, he said he would authorize local law enforcement and the National Guard to conduct workplace raids where undocumented immigrants were suspected of being. He would effectively turn the U.S. into a surveillance state where the government would be constantly monitoring its population to hunt down those who are noncitizens.
It was estimated that deporting one person cost $19,599; deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants would cost hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, it was found that “undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in U.S. taxes in 2022, including $59.4 billion in payments to the federal government and $37.3 billion in payments to states and localities.”
On top of that, undocumented immigrant labor accounts for 10-18% of the workforce in the agriculture, construction, leisure and hospitality industries. Deporting them would mean dramatic reductions in industry output, nationwide shortages and significant increases in prices for goods and services from those industries.
Trump has grown entirely too desperate to win this election. He has admitted that talk of less divisive topics than immigration will bore his audiences, and so he is resorting to deception to gain political support. Mass deportation of hardworking people who support the economy and are less likely to commit crimes is not what this country needs; it needs the truth.
