Mandate for change

The dust had barely settled on President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral ­victory before he began naming members of his new administration. One of his first picks, announced Nov. 10, is immigration hard-liner Tom Homan as “Border Czar.” Another hard-liner, Stephen Miller, will serve as deputy chief of staff. Throughout his campaign, Trump promised to dramatically decrease illegal border crossings, and the selection of Homan is a step toward keeping that promise. Announcing the appointment on Truth Social, Trump posted, “Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”

During an October interview on 60 Minutes that went viral, Homan was asked if there was a way to carry out mass deportations without ­separating families. “Of course there is,” Homan responded. “Families can be deported together.”

Trump, who ran on a promise to “fix” America, will reenter the Oval Office on Jan. 20 with a democratic mandate after winning not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote. He has a long to-do list, but his early appointment of a border czar delivers on his election-night promise to make border security and migration a major focus. After that, Trump likely will turn to another top concern for voters: the economy and inflation. And while he probably would prefer to focus on domestic issues, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will demand his time and attention from day one.

At the Republican National Convention in July, some attendees waved signs declaring “Mass Deportations Now!” But it’s not only MAGA diehards who support such a policy. A poll in September showed that more than half of all Americans, including a quarter of Democrats, support the removal of people who crossed the border illegally. What would that look like? “It’s a process, not an event,” says Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian believes there are currently up to 10 million illegal migrants in America who entered during the Biden administration alone—though the exact figure is impossible to know.

Krikorian expects first to see increased deportations of criminals, an effort that dropped during the Biden administration. He also expects the Trump administration to focus on deporting around 1 million people already ordered to leave: “They’ve had their day in court. They lost, but they just ignored it, and they’re still here.”

Tom Homan speaks during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

But that’s easier said than done. The Trump administration likely will face legal battles and infrastructure challenges, such as housing people prior to deportation and obtaining the cooperation of deportees’ homelands. “You can’t just fly into somebody else’s country and open the door and push people out onto the tarmac. You have to get paperwork,” Krikorian says. Some countries may refuse to issue paperwork or deliberately slow-walk the process. In those cases, U.S. immigration law gives the president legal authority to stop issuing visas to those countries to punish them for not taking back their citizens. President Joe Biden never used that authority, but Trump did during his first term and will likely do so again.

As the 60 Minutes interview with Homan demonstrated, media coverage of deportation often focuses on the question of families with mixed immigration status. For example, the mother has a green card, the father entered illegally, and their children were born in America. But Krikorian thinks that won’t be a significant issue for a long time because other types of deportations will take priority. Also, that situation typically doesn’t apply to recent arrivals, according to Krikorian.

Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, thinks the right policies could encourage self-deportation and also deter people from crossing the border illegally in the first place. Sanctuary cities, businesses that hire illegal migrants, and states that issue them driver’s licenses should face legal and political pressure, Maitra says. He notes that shortly after the election, New York City announced it would stop handing out prepaid debit cards to migrants to buy food: “Why was this not done before? They have read the writing on the wall.”

Along with immigration, voters consistently cited the economy, and particularly the cost of living, as a top concern. To address those issues, Maitra expects Trump to focus on deregulation. “There’s a whole bunch of economic growth which is essentially tied up with regulations, and that is one of the biggest hindrances. We need to let the bull run.”

But Trump has proposed raising tariffs on a wide variety of products. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff,” he said in October, while acknowledging the policy’s critics.

Maitra says the problem is a broad economic consensus that tariffs are never useful and always bad. But he thinks carefully targeted tariffs could stimulate the American economy. “Depending on the tariff, Trump will cut taxes, which will incentivize businesses to start here.”

Encouraged by his wealthiest supporter, Elon Musk, Trump has also expressed interest in reforming the Federal Reserve. He has given few details of what that would look like, beyond saying he would like a greater say in setting interest rates. Daniel McCarthy, editor of the journal Modern Age: A Conservative Review, believes that could be the first major battle of the new Trump administration. The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 and plays a massive role in the American economy. McCarthy says Trump’s team will have to tread very carefully and ask themselves, “How far do we want to go in terms of reining in the Federal Reserve and exerting political control over it? And how much change is perhaps too much?”

As for the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Trump wasted no time in dealing with them. Less than 24 hours after the election, he took calls from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which he reportedly discussed future U.S. policy. McCarthy believes Trump will take the same approach to both conflicts. “He’s going to present off-ramps to all the parties. He’s going to say, ‘You know, things have happened one way under the Biden administration. Now this is a clean slate.’ It’s an opportunity for everyone to cut their losses and just call it a day.”

The convictions of protesters linked to the Jan. 6 riot is also a concern to many Trump voters. They think some “J6” prisoners deserve to be pardoned because they were treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than people who participated in riots connected to causes favored by Democrats, like Black Lives Matter. But McCarthy hopes Trump will do something for all political prisoners. “So if I were Trump, I would not only get the Jan. 6 prisoners commuted, or at least reduce their sentences, but I would also apply this to Hunter Biden. I would just say: ‘You know what? All of these issues that have put people in jail recently, that have been involved in politics. The slate is clean.’”

As for actually getting things done, Maitra believes the scale of Trump’s electoral victory means he won’t likely encounter much resistance. “The House is probably going to be Republican for the next two years. The Senate is overwhelmingly red, and through executive authority, he can do a whole bunch of things.”