Seth Barron Don’t Call Trump’s Plan “Mass Deportation” It’s a propaganda term that doesn’t describe the specific detention and removal plans of the new administration.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-mass-deportation-illegal-immigration
Since the second election of Donald Trump, activists, officials, and journalists have written repeatedly about the coming “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants. The National Immigrant Justice Center has put out a fact sheet warning its clients to “prepare for Trump’s mass deportation threats.” The ACLU observes that “Trump has repeatedly sought to rationalize his plans for mass deportation, blending military and national security rhetoric with xenophobia.” And Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at a rally calling for Temporary Protected Status for Ecuadorians illegally residing in the United States, warned that Trump plans to deploy the “military to conduct mass deportations” of “those who serve as the backbone of our local economies.”
“Mass deportation” is a propaganda term that does not describe the detention and removal plans of the new administration, and it is not used by Trump or his representatives. Mass deportation is the wholesale detention and removal of an entire community based on nationality, ethnicity, or some other immutable characteristic. For example, Stalin engaged in large-scale reorganization of the population of the Soviet Union based on nationality, beginning with the mass deportation of 170,000 ethnic Koreans from their home on the Sea of Japan 4,000 miles west to Uzbekistan. Later, during World War II, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria deported 200,000 Tatars from their home in Crimea thousands of miles to the east.
Other historical mass deportations include Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Deep South and their forced removal a thousand miles west, in what is known as the Trail of Tears. The removal of 112,000 ethnic Japanese from the American Pacific coast during World War II qualifies, too, as does the mass deportation of millions of Jews from German-occupied Europe to concentration and extermination camps in Poland during that same conflict. Mass deportations are indiscriminate in that every person associated with a national or ethnic group is rounded up.
In contrast, the Trump administration’s plans are targeted. The focus, as Trump and his representatives continue to stress, will be on persons who already have an order of removal against them and on illegal aliens who have committed crimes. At Trump’s October 2024 rally at Madison Square Garden, which the Left condemned for its allegedly racist and fascistic themes, he promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.” Tom Homan, his border czar, has elaborated on this plan, explaining:
Every person ICE arrests, they do what we call fugitive operations spreadsheet. They know exactly who they’re going to arrest. They know exactly where they’re probably likely to find them, and they have a lot of information on that arrest. Other people that are there that may be illegal, they’ll handle by case-by-case basis. The concentration—I want to be clear on some public safety threats. If more agents in the jails means less agents in the neighborhood, that’s why I’m pleading with sanctuary cities, let us in the jail to arrest the bad guy. That way you’re not forcing in the community.
More than 1 million people presently residing in the United States are subject to a final order of removal. These individuals include legal immigrants convicted of a crime who have lost their legal right to live here, others who violated their visa conditions, and illegal immigrants who were caught and brought before immigration courts. They have already gone through a process of review and appeal, and judges have ordered their deportation. The government knows who they are, and, as Homan explained, where they live. Arresting and removing this population is a matter of catching up on deferred adjudication. Its scale may be massive, but that doesn’t make it a “mass deportation.”
“Mass deportation” as a term has the same function as “mass incarceration,” in that it makes normal law enforcement sound like a fascist violation of civil rights. But there is no “mass incarceration” in America, because everyone in prison committed crimes as an individual, for which he or she received—or was supposed to receive—due process. They weren’t rounded up as part of a police operation against an ethnic group or tried and found guilty en masse.
Activists and politicians may not want their constituencies to be deported. But the fact that illegal immigrants awaiting removal are here in large numbers is not a compelling argument not to deport them. Nor is deporting them a “mass” action in violation of due process. “Mass” is a term of art that the Left employs to deprecate legal action against favored groups. Proponents of public order shouldn’t use it.
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