On Monday,
the night before the formal launch of his reelection campaign in Florida,
President Donald Trump issued a warning. “Next week ICE will begin the process
of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way
into the United States,” he tweeted. “They will be removed as fast as they come
in.”
This is a
lie. Despite Trump’s obsession, mass deportation of millions of undocumented
immigrants from the United States is virtually impossible. Estimates suggest
that the cost of detaining, processing, and physically removing the country’s
11 million undocumented immigrants would be astronomical. The country’s
immigration system isn’t capable of such punitive expediency, either. The
Washington Post’s Nick Miroff did the math: At its current rate of 7,000 monthly
deportations, it would take two and a half decades for Immigration and
Customs Enforcement to reach Trump’s punitive threshold.
