America needs to talk about how Trump’s deportation plan is really dictatorship

Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95.

After a week of setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the predawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests.

As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops pushes the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.”

This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for.

As polls show Trump in a dead heat nationally with President Joe Biden, and poised to win at least some of the battleground states where Biden was victorious in 2020, the presumptive GOP nominee is making no secret of his scheme for what he calls “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.” The audacious goal of tracking down and deporting all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living and working within the United States is, experts agree, all but impossible. But even the forced removal of hundreds of thousands, or one million, would require a massive internal military operation on a scale not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“I take all of it seriously,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel who monitors national security and liberty issues for the Brennan Center for Justice, and an expert in the presidential uses and abuses of the Insurrection Act that allows for the deployment of soldiers on U.S. soil, told me this week. “I think it’s irresponsible not to. Anytime somebody tells you what they are going to do, you should listen.”

Yet, with the election just over five months away, too many voters aren’t listening to a plan that would fundamentally change America. In one way, that’s understandable. Anti-immigrant bluster was central to Trump’s 2016 campaign, which began with him calling Mexican migrants criminals and rapists. Yet, after he was elected, and despite moves like a cruel family separation policy for refugees seized at the border, Trump actually deported or removed fewer border crossers per year than his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

But the simple fact is that Trump never really planned for a victory in 2016. When he did win, the Trump administration lacked the elaborate plan or the infrastructure for millions of deportations, and there was resistance to his consigliere Miller’s more extreme demands from entrenched bureaucrats, some of the president’s own appointees, and some GOP allies in Congress.

What’s changed in 2024? Everything. Despite the Hannibal Lecter-ized outward chaos of Trump’s rallies, behind the scenes, Team Trump is focused and determined not only to name the most rabid Trump loyalists to key political posts but also to dramatically strip civil service protections and remove recalcitrant midlevel government employees. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to be on board with whatever Trump wants.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parents immigrated from Cuba, and who had correctly blasted Trump’s 2016 deportation plan as unrealistic, is a perfect example of the new zeitgeist. He used Trumpian exaggerated numbers to tell NBC’s Meet the Press recently: “We cannot absorb 25, 30 million people who entered this country illegally. They’re here illegally, what country on Earth could tolerate that?”

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Miller has been making the rounds of right-wing podcasts and talk radio to explain the new math behind the Trump 47 deportation scheme. Experts on immigration enforcement told the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, who wrote the definitive article on the Trump plan, that rounding up 500,000 to one million immigrants a year would require at least 100,000 to 150,000 more government agents than are now deployed, plus 50,000 more to run detention camps and man deportation flights. Miller’s idea is for the president to federalize the National Guard troops in red states like Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas or Gov. Kristi Noem’s South Dakota, and deploy them in areas run by recalcitrant Democrats — like Philadelphia.

The Brennan Center’s Nunn told me that — given the legal complexities of federalizing guard troops and sending them across unfriendly state lines — Trump would be certain to invoke the Insurrection Act. That 1807 law, bolstered during the chaotic peak of Reconstruction after the Civil War, is the workaround for the supposed constitutional ban on deploying American soldiers on domestic soil and has been used roughly 30 times, especially during civil rights unrest and urban riots in the 1960s. The last time the Insurrection Act was used was during the Los Angeles race riots in 1992.

The problem, Nunn said, is that the Insurrection Act places no checks or balances, or restrictions like time limits, on the White House once it has been invoked. “It’s a law intended for emergencies,” he said, “but in practice, it gives a president unlimited powers.” In other words: A Trump declaration of a Desert Storm-sized military operation on U.S. soil would make him essentially a dictator, and for a lot longer than just one day.

The remarkable logistics and the massive troop deployments aren’t the only aspects of Trump’s deportation scheme that voters aren’t paying attention to. Remember how March’s Baltimore bridge disaster accidentally revealed how essential recent immigrants, including the undocumented, have become to bedrock American industries like construction? Experts say abruptly removing millions of workers from the U.S. economy could send it into a tailspin.

Writing in the Washington Monthly, economist Robert J. Shapiro crunches the numbers and finds Trump’s ambitious deportation goals would remove about 4.5% of the current U.S. workforce, and create ripples that would cause hundreds of thousands of native-born Americans to lose their jobs, as well. Shapiro posits that “if Trump’s program were carried out over three years, it would produce a downturn that could approximate the Great Recession in 2009, when GDP fell 2.6% and sluggish growth persisted for years.”

Why aren’t Biden and his Democratic allies talking about this more? A February Gallup poll found U.S. voters ranking immigration as the number one issue for the first time ever, and while the number of asylum-seekers has dropped dramatically since then, Democrats’ inclination is to avoid looking “soft” on the issue. I’m sure some fear that calling out the over-the-top fascist elements of Trump’s plans might sound hysterical — even when that’s what he’s openly proposing.

And yet, there are so many unanswered questions. What would happen to the estimated 4.4 million children who were born here as U.S. citizens with at least one undocumented parent? How long would it take for heavily armed Insurrection Act troops to turn their firepower against the large number of Americans who would inevitably take to the streets in protest? Is a country where our neighbors and coworkers fear a knock on the door every night, while the world gawks at pictures of barbed-wire detention camps that look like colorized photos from the 1940s, really the future we want?

It was somewhat amazing to watch the furious debate online and on cable news this week over the weird incident in which small text about a “unified Reich” found its way into a Trump promo video the ex-and-wannabe president posted on Truth Social. The perplexing part, for me, is that this was discussed as some kind of Sherlock-Holmes-magnifying-glass a-ha moment, revealing Trump’s secret plan for Nazi-style rule.

Folks, he is screaming his plan out loud at his rallies! The Trump deportation scheme is really Trump’s blueprint for dictatorship.

If voters understood this reality, perhaps even the voters who strongly favor a reduction in immigration would oppose this militaristic nightmare. We can stop this at the ballot box in November, long before Texas National Guard tanks backing up the Schuylkill Expressway become the lead traffic report on KYW.

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