The Great Deportation of 2025

“We know who you are, and we’re going to come and find you,” said Thomas Homan one day after President-elect Donald Trump named him as the incoming administration’s “border czar,” responsible for border security and the removal of unauthorized migrants. Homan has promised to carry out “the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

If he succeeds, it will reshape migration for a generation or longer—not just in the United States but in much of the world.

This moment has been building slowly. Since roughly the 1960s, most of the advanced economies—with the notable exception of Japan—gradually opened themselves to larger flows of migrants. In the United States, the foreign-born share of the population rose from less than 5 percent in 1970 to nearly 15 percent today; in Britain, that share rose from a little more than 6 percent to more than 16 percent.

Most Western countries saw immigration as an economic winner, bringing talent and ambition and helping fill labor shortages in occupations from farm work to health care. There was a strong humanitarian impulse as well: Horrified by the refusal of most countries to admit European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War, Western countries adopted generous refugee and asylum laws obligating them to admit many of those escaping persecution, torture, or death threats around the world.

But in the 21st century, that welcoming spirit has crumbled. In the 2000s, Congress tried several times to pass legislation to legalize unauthorized migrants who were longtime U.S. residents, as it had done during the administration of President Ronald Reagan in 1986. The most recent effort failed in the House of Representatives in 2014, despite support from more than two-thirds of senators, including 14 Republicans.

Then over the past decade, both the United States and Europe faced a series of migration crises, with displaced people arriving at their borders in far larger numbers than governments could handle or their populations were willing to accept. Tinkering with asylum processing and enlisting help from neighboring states such as Mexico or Turkey bought occasional breathing room—until the number of arrivals would inevitably soar again, creating a fresh crisis.

With the growing number of migrants fleeing conflict, violence, or economic collapse—the number of displaced persons worldwide has doubled over the past decade, to nearly 120 million today—immigration has become more politically charged across the world. In Europe, populist parties running on anti-immigrant platforms have made widespread gains. Even countries that have historically welcomed large numbers of migrants, such as Canada and Australia, have become warier and are reducing immigration quotas.

But no country faces an about-face as stark as that in the United States. Trump returns to the White House with what he believes is a mandate to sweep the country of unauthorized migrants, including millions who have been in the United States for decades and millions more who have arrived in the past four years and enjoy temporary legal status under the Biden administration’s more generous schemes.

Trump’s first appointments attest to his seriousness. Homan has four decades of experience on migration issues; as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, he was the architect of the controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children when they crossed the border from Mexico illegally.

Trump’s new deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, has spent the last 15 years schooling himself in the intricacies of U.S. immigration laws to wield them in the service of a xenophobic agenda. At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in late October, Miller told the cheering crowd that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

And the president-elect’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Gov. Kristi Noem, deployed National Guard troops from her state of South Dakota to help stop migrants at the Texas-Mexico border.

It is not at all clear, however, that Americans actually voted for this agenda. Immigration was a big issue in the campaign, but surveys indicate that it ran well behind the state of the economy and was a second-tier issue alongside health care, national security, the Supreme Court, and the future of democracy.

Polls on immigration are also all over the map. A September Pew Research poll found that nearly 9 in 10 Trump supporters, and 56 percent of registered voters overall, said that they favor “mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally,” suggesting strong support for the Trump agenda. But 58 percent also favor allowing undocumented immigrants to remain in the country if they are married to a U.S. citizen. And considerably higher majorities—including half or more of Trump supporters—want to admit more refugees, foreign college graduates, and immigrants who can fill labor shortages.

The new administration’s actions will be a test of which of these competing priorities Americans will actually support. In his first term, Trump did not push very hard. While he all but shut down refugee admissions from overseas, took steps to curb legal migration, and tightened the U.S. border with Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic, his administration did little to remove migrants already present in the country. The total number of deportations during his first four years was 1.5 million—half as many as President Barack Obama’s first term and similar to the number in Obama’s second term and outgoing President Joe Biden’s four years.

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Migrants targeted for deportation are permitted to appeal their removal to U.S. immigration courts, an arm of the Justice Department. The backlog in those courts is more than 3 million cases, a sixfold increase since 2016; wait times for hearings can stretch to two years or longer. U.S. detention capacity for all migrants—either recent arrivals or those awaiting removal—is roughly 40,000.

Miller has pushed for the government to create tent cities along the border to expand that capacity, but the costs would be high. The American Immigration Council has estimated that it would cost $88 billion annually to detain and deport 1 million migrants per year, which is nearly nine-tenths of the entire current DHS budget. And many countries are reluctant to take their own citizens back. Venezuela has at times refused entirely, and others, including Cuba and China, are considered “recalcitrant.”

Homan promised in a Nov. 8 interview with Fox News to start by focusing on “public security threats and national security threats,” which is pretty much what the Biden administration and others have done; more than 40 percent of those arrested and targeted for removal by ICE in 2023 had some sort of criminal conviction or pending charge.

Beyond that, things get harder. Homan has promised to revive “worksite enforcement” in which ICE targets workplaces such as slaughterhouses and farms that are suspected of employing large numbers of undocumented migrants. The history of such raids suggests that they will be difficult.

Only one large-scale raid—against chicken processing plants in Mississippi—was conducted during Trump’s first term. Some 700 migrants were arrested and some deported, but the employers got off with a slap on the wrist. The Mississippi plants continue to face large labor shortages and continue to hire unauthorized migrants.

Many of Trump’s wealthy donors rely on foreign workers, including unauthorized migrants, and are likely to push back against the resumption of workplace raids.

Reaching deep into American communities will be harder still. To start, it is challenging simply to find undocumented migrants; unlike some countries, U.S. residents are not required to carry documents that prove their right to be in the country. Many states, including California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, also have “sanctuary” laws that prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE agents, making arrests and detentions more difficult.

Homan has promised to ignore such obstacles in deploying ICE agents: “If sanctuary cities don’t want to help us, then get out of the way, because we’re coming,” he said on Fox & Friends. Miller has also talked about getting friendly red states to call up state-level National Guard forces and sending them to assist ICE agents in blue states. This could set up unprecedented clashes across state borders.

The public reaction is hard to predict. Most immigration enforcement takes place near the border or quietly, when unauthorized migrants are detained on criminal charges and turned over to ICE. Sending agents into neighborhoods to arrest individual migrants will be far more explosive; nearly 14 million U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents live in households where are least one member is unauthorized. Nearly 1 in 3 Latino families—a group that voted  more strongly for Trump in this election than in the previous two—is faced with the threat of removal or family separation in the event of a mass deportation.

All of this assumes, of course, that the new administration chooses to be constrained by existing laws and norms. But other options may exist. With Republican control of both the House and the Senate, Trump may be able to push through laws not only to boost funding for removal operations, but also to weaken legal protections for unauthorized migrants.

His officials are likely to expand the use of expedited removal—a provision that permits removal without a court hearing for recent arrivals. Previous administrations have used the power almost exclusively to remove unauthorized border crossers shortly after their arrival, but Trump tried late in his first term to extend that power to migrants who had lived anywhere in the country for less than two years. The increasingly pro-Trump courts may help such an effort pass muster.

This week, Trump suggested he may go farther still and declare a national emergency—using broad powers granted by Congress to the president—in order to deploy the U.S. military to expedite deportations.

Even if his deportation plans fall short, a large-scale attempt of the sort being promised will mark a revolution in the U.S. approach to migration. Until now, conservative critics of immigration, including Trump himself during his first term, have focused largely on securing borders and reducing new arrivals. Right-wing parties in Europe, too, have focused on tightening borders.

But if the United States starts mass removal, populist governments in other parts of the world will likely be emboldened to take more draconian measures as well. Despite the political controversies, the United States has long been something of a model for embracing immigration—more than one-fifth of all the world’s migrants reside in the United States. Mass deportation will send a far uglier message.

If the effort proves too difficult, and Trump buckles to the inevitable backlash, the political debate in the United States may revert to where it has been for decades: how to provide a reasonable level of security at the border while continuing to admit new immigrants who benefit the economy—and looking the other way at the millions of unauthorized migrants who have settled and built lives in the country.

For decades now, that has been a messy and uncomfortable compromise. But the alternative promises to be much worse.