Trump has called for rapid and historic deportations of the estimated 11 million immigrants — he says there are more — who are in the country illegally. He wants the National Guard and U.S. military, as well as police forces in cooperative states, to go door-to-door in a process that he recently said would be a “bloody story.” He has not ruled out creating detention camps to hold people awaiting deportation, though he has maintained that the removals would be so fast, camps would not be necessary.
Policy experts doubt it would be so easy.
“It’s not just simply putting someone on a plane and sending them back to their country,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
Officials would have to locate the immigrants, who are often living in the shadows, and then disrupt families and local economies to remove them, she said. They would also need to negotiate with other governments — some uncooperative, others ill-equipped — to verify immigrants’ identities and accept them, and then find airplanes to send people back, she said.