The New York Times reported on Trump’s agenda to limit, exclude, and expel immigrants if he is re-elected. Of course, he would revive his ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations. And he would create massive detention centers. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be deported. The headline sums it up: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps, and Mass Deportations.”
The story, written by Charlie Savage, Mafmggir Haberman, and Jonathan Swan, is chilling. Forget that poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Forget the “golden door.” The door will be closed.
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.
And here is a policy that should get the attention of Arab-Americans who are thinking of voting for Trump because of Biden’s support for Israel:
In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes…
Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.
Trump’s chief advisor on immigration policy is Stephen Miller, who endorses draconian policies to ban and oust immigrants.
Miller told the Times:
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Many people read about changes in immigration policies without ever considering, even a tiny bit, their actual human toll. How many families will this uproot? How many tear apart?
But, ofc, the likes of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller don’t care, not if it is brown people involved.
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To be fair, though, border crossings and apprehensions are at all time highs and the vast majority of them are economic migrants, not people fleeing political or ethnic persecution with legitimate asylum claims. This isn’t just a moral panic with no factual basis.
I favor increased immigration because I think we need it to grow sustainably as a nation. But at the same time, our border policy clearly isn’t working. And Biden’s approach hasn’t been drastically different than Trump’s.
If by some miracle the Dems managed to take control over both the Senate and House, they should pass something like the bipartisan immigration bill that Trump just scuttled. We need a lot of things—more immigration judges, perhaps some way to streamline the process so that patently bullsh!t asylum claims are rejected much more quickly, incentives in the form of economic aid to deter people from migrating, ways to reduce the massive burdens on localities that absorb a huge number of migrants, a real kitchen sink approach.
But any immigration policy is going to require a lot of deportations (even now we do that) and things that people will consider cruel on a human level.
This comes to mind: https://youtu.be/s9TOWIc_KLU?si=wygjQkRuPk3YfKUw
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To be fair, we need a LOT MORE immigration.
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Agree. The projections for total population over the next 100 years and beyond seem plausible to me. Nations will compete for immigrants.
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https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/population-projections.html
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Can it be far off to hear of camps where good Europeans are bred for the solution to the labor shortage problem
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Was just thinking about how – after pretty much “cleansing” eastern european countries of what Hitler saw as the dirty vermin folks, like Jews and Romany – the Germans were putting Poles and Slavs into forced labor camps and factories. The Germans didn’t feel the need to exterminate all Poles, but they did believe they were “lesser” than the best Aryans, and a solution to the labor problem.
I imagine that the far right white supremacists have some similar idea where some people with superior white ethnic backgrounds are differentiated from those with inferior white ethnic backgrounds, who will provide the labor.
The mainstream Republicans have become the far right neo-Nazi parties that were condemned by both Dems and Republicans in the 1960s and 70s. I never imagined the NYT would normalize this. I never imagined it could happen here. But now I believe that a lot of good things need to happen that are unlikely to happen (like the NYT hiring journalists instead of sycophants) to prevent it from happening here.
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Politico and other sites reported that KellyAnne Conway is advocating for Tik Tok (Chinese) on Capitol Hill. Club for Growth, largely funded by Jeffrey Yass, is allegedly backing Tik Tok’s position. Presumably, Yass would also support a Chinese school chain operating in the US (the possibility of a school chain owned by the Chinese was introduced at the blog some time ago).
A wrinkle that makes the topic interesting can be found in the recent religious voucher post. A professor’s comment in the thread, expressed his view about (IMO, sounded like a defense for) school vouchers. In 2023, the professor wrote an opinion printed by media expressing his opposition to his state’s proposed law prohibiting Chinese ownership of real property in the state (the Chinese government, Chinese nationals, etc. )
This morning, Marco Rubio described in an interview, the grave threat that China poses to US interests.
KellyAnne and/or Yass, policy influencers in a Trump administration (if he’s elected) ?
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Putin plays a zero sum game. A weaker, divided America is tantamount to a stronger, unified Russia. Trump sells his “our country is a joke” swill to the masses all in service to his poisoning elf master. He is a traitor in every sense, a cancer on the body politic that must be excised to save the patient.
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You nailed who and what Trump is!!! He with the nasty elf master.
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