For 20 years, Blanca Pacheco fought on behalf of immigrants in Philadelphia, becoming painfully familiar with federal operations to deport men, women and children.
Sometimes a father disappears from the community after being arrested by ICE. Other times it is a mother with her children.
Now President-elect Donald Trump aims to eclipse everything that has come before by announcing an unprecedented removal of millions of undocumented people across the United States, starting on his first day in office.
“We’re preparing as if everything he says is going to be true,” said Pacheco, co-director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, an advocacy group. “We don’t deny how bad it can get. But we don’t want to panic.”
Trump has provided few details of his plan, but he has promised mass deportations of those who are not allowed to stay in the country – about 13 million people, or about the population of Pennsylvania. This would require authorities to locate, capture, confine, feed, adjudicate and remove several times the number of all animals currently present. held in American jails and prisons.
Can Trump do it? Experts say this would be difficult to achieve, demanding billions of dollars in taxes, unrivaled government mobilization and a radical expansion of the country’s deportation apparatus.
But they say even partial success for the administration could cause massive disruption not only to those who would be arrested and detained but also to America’s economy and civic life as millions of neighbors, workers and family members are sent out of the country.
The immediate local target would be 47,000 undocumented people in Philadelphia, some of the 153,000 statewide, and an additional 440,000 in New Jersey. ICE is exploring ways to increase the Garden State’s inmate population, potentially adding 600 beds at at least two facilities, as well as the National Association of Agency Officers – wrote in the statement that moving agents “are energized and ready to go.”
“There is no doubt that it will be ugly,” said Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute at New York University School of Law.
Trump said he would announce it national emergencyusing military resources to carry out “the largest deportation program in American history.” He promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which was in effect during the 1798 war, to put “these cruel and bloodthirsty criminals in prison, and then throw them out of our country as quickly as possible.”
Or rather, immigrants commit crimes less frequently than the U.S.-born population. Without a doubt, Trump’s plans will surpass other major deportations dating back more than a century.
“It’s going to be bad, but I don’t know how bad”
Local people without legal status are concerned.
“It’s going to be bad, but I don’t know how bad,” said E., 24, an undocumented fast food worker in Philadelphia who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that he be identified by one initial.
He arrived here about a year ago, drawn by the “celebrated American dream,” he said, leaving Ecuador, which had become dangerous and unstable. He entered the U.S. legally and stayed when his visa expired.
His undocumented co-workers are also on edge at a moment when legal immigration status becomes paramount.
“They won’t ask you, ‘Are you a good person?’ Are you a criminal?” – asked E. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”
As Trump’s inauguration approached, he tried to be less perceptible. A few weeks ago, a man on the Market Street subway line started shouting that he wanted people deported, and E. began to wonder about his own physical safety.
“It is very important that immigrants know and exercise their rights,” said Hyeonock “Mel” Lee, executive director Worri Center, an Asian American criminal justice organization in Lansdale. “It’s important for people to know there are others who can understand their experiences [and who] they can count on support and resources.”
There are millions of illegal immigrants in the United States
About 11 million people – about 3.3% of the U.S. population – are not eligible to be here. An additional 2.3 million crossed the southern border without legal status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2023 and early 2024.
Above Half of Americans support throwing them away polls show that the government’s action is completely legal. Deportations are held year after year under Republican and Democratic presidentsincluding about 145,000 last year under President Joe Biden.
However, a Brookings Institution analysis found that mass deportations would likely require a level of public law enforcement that Americans are unaccustomed to, including widespread arrests at workplaces, schools and health care facilities. It is unclear whether it will be possible to hire enough federal agents at all, he wrote Tara Watson, director of the institution Center for Economic Security and Opportunity.
An in-depth study conducted by the nonpartisan American Immigration Council considered two scenarios:
In one of them, as Vice President-elect J.D. Vance mentioned, the administration would try to deport one million people a year, more than twice the historical figure. The peak was about 400,000 during the first Obama administration, and that included those who were stopped at the border and quickly removed.
The study estimates it will cost about $88 billion a year, with additional costs totaling $967.9 billion over 10 years.
The second scenario is a one-time deportation of all 13 million undocumented people, which would conservatively cost $315 billion, the council said. That’s more than the government spends on running the U.S. military.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement would need to hire 30,000 recent agents and employees, which would immediately make it one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the federal government.
The study predicted that the U.S. economy would suffer once undocumented workers, as well as their labor money and taxes, disappeared. The study estimates that the loss in gross domestic product would be between 4.2% and 6.8%, potentially greater than during the Great Recession when GDP fell by 4.3% from 2007 to 2009.
The government would lose $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, and Social Security contributions would decline by $22.6 billion for Social Security and $5.7 billion for Medicare. One in eight construction and agriculture workers would be deported, and the hospitality industry would lose one in 14.
Rising storage costs
Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the Trump administration’s ability to deport huge numbers of people will depend on many factors.
“How much money is Congress willing to give them? How aggressive are they willing to be towards the National Guard and the US military?” she asked. “What if they don’t respect the rule of law? In a world where they are active on the scale of how they say they intend to operate, these questions will become very real.
Huge expenses would involve the need to build new deportation infrastructure, especially detention centers. The study found that the United States would need to create 24 times as many beds as it currently has, create more than 1,000 new courtrooms, hire hundreds of new immigration judges and dramatically expand deportation flights.
“The reality is that deporting 13 million people seems functionally and practically impossible,” said attorney Bridget Cambria, executive director of Aldea – the People’s Justice Center in Reading. “But that doesn’t mean that showing the executive branch’s power over immigration won’t be scary for large groups of people.”
ABOUT 8.5 million undocumented residents live in mixed-status households — that is, they live with U.S. citizens, people with legal status, or both, according to the Center for Migration Studies in New York, which studies international migration. An estimated 4.4 million U.S. citizen children have an undocumented parent who can be taken away.
For many migrants, arrest will not immediately mean deportation. This could mean jail. And the abyss.
For example, Venezuelans make up about 270,000 undocumented people, but their home country does not have a deportation agreement with the United States. Bhutan is not accepting deportees, nor is North Korea or other countries that cite costs and security risks.
“If you are undocumented, you can be detained,” said Cambria, who worked to close the Berks Detention Center, ending the detention of families in Pennsylvania. “And the period of detention can be indefinite.”
Any mass deportation effort would have to be carried out amid the fierce resistance that pledge supporters rally in the streets and in courthouses on behalf of immigrants.
“Many will have protection and relief,” said attorney Emma Tuohy, a relocation specialist and president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
He expects the administration will augment deportations, but the mechanics and logistics will make it challenging.
Already immigration courts the backlog amounts to 3.7 million casesincluding nearly 90,000 in Pennsylvania and 220,000 in New Jersey. AND study by the Migration Policy Institute found that only 18% of people ordered deported in 2020 were actually removed.
“Despite the heated rhetoric, there will be many barriers before anything can happen,” said Cathryn Miller-Wilson, executive director of HIAS Pennsylvania, an organization that helps low-income immigrants and refugees.
There have been huge deportations in the United States before, undertaken by the federal government, local authorities and law enforcement officials.
In 1917, more than 1,000 striking mine workers in Arizona were kidnapped and sent to a town near the Mexican border in what became known as the Bisbee deportation. Fear of working during the crisis caused 1.8 million people, including U.S. citizens, to be perceived as Mexicans, put on trains and buses and sent away. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a military-style operation that removed over a million Mexican immigrants.
None of these deportations came close to the scale Trump says he intends.
“I don’t understand how they can do this without being really violent,” said Pacheco of the New Sanctuary Movement. “Families are sacred and we will do our best to defend that sanctity. We will do everything in our power to protect these families and everything in our power to fight back.”
