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Tag: mass deportations

Right-Wing Spanish Media Cover Up Trump's Mass Deportation Plan

Conservative Spanish-language media personalities have been downplaying President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations, claiming that Democrats and the media are fearmongering about Trump’s deportation scheme, which economists suggest would increase inflation as well as food and housing costs. These media figures have claimed that Trump “will not deport working immigrants” and that he is considering “immigration reform for all of those in the United States that are doing it right.”

In truth, Trump has vowed to stage the “largest deportation operation in American History,” and Tom Homan — the Project 2025 contributor and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director who Trump selected to carry out this campaign — has claimed, “No one’s off the table.”

Recently, during an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Trump doubled down on his campaign promise to end birthright citizenship, falsely suggesting he could enact his plan through executive action and that he would “change” the 14th Amendment.

Rather than focusing on these claims, conservative personalities on social media turned attention to Trump’s claims that he was willing to “work something out” for Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to the US as minors and remain undocumented. Ignoring his previous failed attempt to gut the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — which has provided benefits like temporary relief from deportation and work authorization to more than 835,000 migrants who came to the U.S. as children — conservative personalities argued Trump has “dismantled the narrative” that he is “racist.”

Downplaying Trump's plans for mass deportations

Conservative Spanish-language personalities are claiming that the left is “sowing fear” about Trump’s plans for mass deportations and that Trump “will not deport working migrants.”

On Actualidad Radio’s Cada Tarde, conservative personality Marian de la Fuente claimed, “There has been a lot of misinformation” about “family separation and kids and parents who will be deported.” She added, “This type of information, in the way the liberal networks are conveying it, should really be modified,” explaining that “they are obviously trying to sow fear.”[Actualidad Radio, Cada Tarde, 11/12/24]
During a guest appearance on Fox Noticias, Voz Media political analyst Alfonso Aguilar argued that Democrats “want to sow fear.” He said that they “say this is an effort to deport people indiscriminately, that the country will be militarized, that we will have patrols of soldiers through urban migrant communities, and that is totally false.” He also claimed, “The armed forces will be used, or the national guard, but in a supporting role.” [Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, 11/20/24]

On his Voz Media podcast, Aguilar claimed, “The left and many in the media are sowing fear” and that “they want to tell us the country is going to be militarized, that there will be mass indiscriminate deportations [and] that they will deport grandma.” He added, “That has become a Democratic talking point.” Aguilar made these claims in an episode where he interviewed Fox News contributor Sara Carter. [YouTube, 11/26/24]
In a segment criticizing The View’s Ana Navarro’s claims that Trump’s plan for mass deportations “means grandmothers,” Fox Noticias host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed that “liberals are losing their mind over Trump’s new border czar.” During the segment, Campos-Duffy mistranslated an Axios headline that said, “Immigrant advocates mobilize against mass deportation,” to claim, “According to the media, immigration advocates are mobilizing against the plan to impose law and order at our borders.” [Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, 11/13/24; Axios, 11/12/24]
On TikTok, Luis Sin Filtro, a conservative influencer with over 566,000 followers, argued that “it's obviously impossible” for the Trump administration to deport American citizens. He also claimed that Homan “has clearly and specifically said that threats to public safety will be the priority,” arguing, “It's most likely that if you find yourself in one of those raids, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you are informed and have not committed any crimes in this country, you won't be affected negatively. On the contrary, there is a very big chance for you to build your case in an immigration court and end up with a working permit.” [TikTok, 11/12/24]
PelucasGB, a conservative personality with over 56,300 followers, shared a video arguing that “Trump will not deport working immigrants” and that “Trump’s rhetoric has always been against criminals.” He also claimed that Trump could “pass immigration reform for all of those in the United States that are doing it right,” and that Trump “will be the one to make your dream of having status in the United States come true.” [TikTok, 11/26/24]

Ignoring Trump's hostility to DACA

Despite Trump’s previous attempts to gut DACA, Spanish-language social media figures are claiming his comments on Meet the Press that he would potentially “work something out” for Dreamers “dismantled the narrative” that he is “racist” and “the most anti-immigrant man ever.”

Luiyo2.0, a conservative personality with over 152,700 followers on TikTok, argued Trump’s comments on Meet the Press “completely dismantled the narrative against Donald Trump in which they claim he is racist.” He added, “If this is true and Trump can solve the DACA problem, he will undoubtedly become one of the best presidents in the United States of America.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]
LuisSinFiltro shared a video claiming, “Trump said he plans to work with Democrats to legalize Dreamers, that is to give them permanent status, not just temporary protection like DACA.” He added, “Trump just dragged all those political activists and ‘pro-immigration,’ ‘non-for-profit’ organizations that said Donald Trump is the most anti-immigrant man in history.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]
PelucasGB shared a video claiming that “while Democrats try to discredit Donald Trump by saying he wants to deport everyone,” he “said he wants Dreamers to be able to stay in the United States.” He went on to claim that Trump “could become the second Republican president in history to deliver a reform for everyone regardless of nationality.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Border State Sheriffs Defying Trump On Mass Deportation Scheme

President-elect Donald Trump's advisors have been hoping county sheriffs in border states will assist with the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign. But several sheriffs are already publicly promising to not lift a finger.

According to a Tuesday report in WIRED magazine, top Trump immigration advisors like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have been having conversations with several far-right sheriffs who have expressed an interest in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remove immigrants from the United States. But that effort is unlikely to pick up traction, both for legal reasons and because other sheriffs have said they already have their hands full and don't want to take on more work.

Currently, ICE's 287(g) program allows for state and local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE in its efforts "to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens." However, this does not include sheriffs themselves rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants.

Additionally, no federal funding has been appropriated to any sheriffs' offices that help ICE, meaning just 125 out of 3,081 sheriff's offices in the U.S. have signed up. And Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told WIRED that the Supreme Court has already established that enforcing immigration law is outside the jurisdiction of local police departments and sheriffs' offices.

"[T]hat's not our realm of responsibility," Wilmot said. "If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol."

The push for sheriffs to assist the incoming administration has been led by retired sheriff Tom Mack, who is the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Mack told WIRED he's been exchanging voice and text messages with Homan about getting more sheriffs involved with deportations. Homan has previously promised to build "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." But Wilmot said "no one listens to" Mack, that he "hasn't been a sheriff in a long time" and that he "pushes his own agenda."

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who is a Democrat, told WIRED that he wasn't invited to an event Homan hosted in his state last month, even though Hathaway's jurisdiction includes some of the nation's biggest ports of entry. He added that he would refuse any calls to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, as it would hurt his standing in his county.

"I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway said. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community."

The sheriffs bucking calls to assist with mass deportations even include some of Trump's biggest supporters in the law enforcement community. Livingston County, Michigan Sheriff Mike Murphy — who hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff's office — told the outlet that he isn't interested in using county resources to help with federal immigration law enforcement.

"I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy said. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”

Other border state sheriffs who have come out against calls to help the Trump administration round up migrants include Val Verde County, Texas Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez and Brewster County, Texas Sheriff Ronny Dodson. According to Dodson, the incoming Trump administration giving sheriffs the authority to jail migrants could "break" county law enforcement.

"I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job," Dodson said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Why Red States Will Rue Trump's Plan To Deport Undocumented Immigrants

Whether immigration played a significant role in Donald Trump’s presidential victory this November, he and his nascent administration have certainly read the election results as a mandate to deliver on his promises of mass deportations.

Yet talk is easier than action, and if carried out, the costs will be disproportionately borne by red states and areas.

Half of all undocumented immigrants in the country live in Florida, Texas, and California, according to data compiled by the American Immigration Council. But while California will put up every legal roadblock and refuse to assist federal authorities in targeting its own undocumented population, Texas and Florida may gleefully participate.

In Florida, 5% of the population is undocumented, or 1.1 million people, and that doesn’t include immigrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti residing under temporary protected status, which will clearly be targeted by the Trump administration.

If emptied out of all undocumented immigrants, Florida would lose $1.8 billion in tax revenue, while Texas would lose nearly $5 billion, while those same immigrants are mostly ineligible for government benefits. That’s free money for the states.

Then there are the economic consequences—if you remove millions of low-wage workers, everything from agriculture, to construction, to industries like hospitality suddenly become dramatically more expensive. Florida’s 2023 anti-immigrant law, which cracked down on businesses hiring undocumented workers, could end up costing the state over $12 billion a year. Crops are rotting in the field, as farms lack the labor for harvest. Roofing companies, swamped with work after hurricane season, lack workers to patch up homes.

And what happens when demand is greater than supply? Trump is going to have a hard time fulfilling promises of lowering prices when his signature policies (deportation and tariffs) are both highly inflationary.

For industries like agriculture and construction, the cost of mass deportations is so high and obvious that it is downright shocking that they would vote as Republican as they did. Nationally, 64 percent of rural voters—heavily dependent on agriculture—voted for Trump.

The numbers are even more stark in counties classified as “farming dependent” by the United States Department of Agriculture. Of the 444 farming-dependent counties, Trump won 433 of them by an average of 78 perccent. The outliers? They were mostly Black-majority farming counties along the Mississippi River in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

So it’s kind of pathetic watching industry agricultural groups now beg Trump to spare their workers from the very thing they voted for. (These are the same people who are also freaked out about tariffs and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

There are electoral ramifications as well. Undocumented immigrants are counted by the census and are included for purposes of reapportionment, which impacts the Electoral College. Given that California and New York are expected to lose as many as 7-8 seats to Texas and Florida, a massive shift in the undocumented population would certainly affect these projections. If these projections pan out, a Democratic presidential nominee will need more than just the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win the White House (unlike today).

The combination of expulsions, self-deportations (as immigrants head back home on their own), and migratory shifts from unsafe red states to sanctuary blue states could very well dramatically reshape the reapportionment math. It will bear watching if Trump disproportionately targets blue states for this very reason, despite the aggressively anti-immigrant governors in Florida and Texas, happy to lend the feds a helpful hand.

Trump’s biggest challenge, of course, is reality. How do you deport 12 million undocumented workers? The United States Border Patrol has less than 20,000 agents as of 2022, and just under 17,000 of those actually patrolling the border.

Where are they going to get the manpower to raid Los Angeles, Houston, Omaha, and Peoria in any appreciable numbers? Some estimates place the cost of deportations at hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Without state support, the feds will have limited options. “It’s not going to be successful, as long as we have sanctuary cities and states that refuse to allow local and state police departments to work with ICE,” former Trump U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan told Stateline.

So what is the benefit of a plan that is horrifically expensive, drives prices up for everyone, disproportionately harms rural America and red states, and may actually give blue states a population boost ahead of the 2030 census?

There is a very real chance that Trump’s mass deportation effort accounts to little more than typical Trump bluster and some high-profile raids. But if Texas and Florida lean in hard to help out in their own states, self-deportation back to their homelands and internal migration to safer blue states may very well end up backfiring on Republicans with the only thing they truly care about—their ability to wield power.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Fox Hosts Offer Public Relations Advice To Promote Mass Deportations

Fox News hosts are advising the incoming Trump administration to hire public relations professionals so it can control coverage of the fallout from immigration policies like mass deportation.

On Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said incoming Trump “border czar” Tom Homan “needs a PR team” once the administration begins advancing its immigration agenda.

Kilmeade laid out a scenario where liberal critics of Homan might discuss children and families affected by the new policies.

“I think it’s important, when Tom Homan rolls this out, they want to show the image of Tom Homan callously saying these families that have been here nine years and they’re just trying to work under the radar they’re the problem,” Kilmeade added.

Lawrence Jones, his fellow co-host, agreed. “You know what’s going to happen on the other side. You’re going to have AOC and company crying at the gates, again.” Jones concluded, “You’ve got to have a media strategy.”

His reference to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was a frequently mentioned (in conservative circles) 2018 protest she participated in against the Trump administration’s family separation policy and children being housed in a tent city in El Paso, Texas.

The international and domestic fallout to the separation policy was a hallmark of Trump’s first term and what the Fox hosts are hoping to avoid via their on-air advice. Concerns are elevated following a recent appearance from Homan on Fox where he said the incoming administration would pursue cutting off federal funds from states whose governors refuse to comply with mass deportation.

Not only was the United States criticized around the world on family separation, but reunification of those families is also a project that the Biden administration has had to focus on for four years—with some families still torn apart.

The advice offered by the Fox hosts is not merely punditry, but an acknowledgement that there is a revolving door between the political world around Trump and the conservative network. Trump hires faces from Fox, implements Fox-backed policies, and Fox responds by manipulating the news to assist Trump and amplifying pro-Trump rhetoric and ideas.

In this instance Fox is effectively giving Trump a heads-up and marching orders, and history shows he is very likely to do as instructed.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Start your day with The National Memo Newsletter

Right-Wing Spanish Media Cover Up Trump's Mass Deportation Plan

Downplaying Trump's plans for mass deportations

Ignoring Trump's hostility to DACA

Border State Sheriffs Defying Trump On Mass Deportation Scheme

Why Red States Will Rue Trump's Plan To Deport Undocumented Immigrants

Fox Hosts Offer Public Relations Advice To Promote Mass Deportations

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