Donald Trump to begin mass deportation program on his first day in office

Donald Trump is preparing to order the largest mass deportation in American history on the day he takes office.

President-elect Donald Trump with his granddaughter Kai, 17, with whom he played golf on Sunday. Picture: X

Donald Trump is preparing to order the largest mass deportation in American history on the day he takes office, a spokeswoman for his transition team said.

Mr Trump spoke on the campaign trail of targeting up to 20 million people as part of a crackdown echoing – though far exceeding – the deportations of up to 1.3 million Mexican undocumented immigrants by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.

Now policy advisers are drawing up dozens of executive orders for him to sign after his inauguration on January 20, transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News overnight on Sunday.

“On day one he’s going to open the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in American history,” she said.

Mr Trump would restore the Remain in Mexico policy that ­required migrants seeking asylum to remain on the southern side of the border until their court date, she said. Other orders would seek “to expedite fracking and drilling” and to reverse orders signed by President Joe Biden.

“This man is already working around the clock,” Ms Leavitt said of Mr Trump.

There were further signs over the weekend that loyalty to the president-elect will be a crucial quality for anyone seeking a role in his administration. Mr Trump had already announced at the weekend that neither Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the UN who ran against him in the Republican primary, nor Mike Pompeo, the CIA director and secretary of state in Mr Trump’s first administration, would be considered for a job.

Politico reported that the statement on Truth Social came not long after it sought a response to a claim that Mr Pompeo was seeking the post of defence secretary but was being opposed by Mr Trump’s son Donald Jr and right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who served as a surrogate for Mr Trump in his campaign.

Mr Pompeo is said to have considered running for the presidency this year and endorsed Mr Trump later than some of his supporters.

“There is a desire to not have people with presidential ambitions” using a cabinet role as a launchpad, an official in the first Trump administration told the website. “He got burnt by Mike previously, and by Haley, and his foreign policy views are not aligned with the president.”

Lawyer and Trump adviser Mike Davis suggested on X that he was fielding requests from other jobseekers hoping for a role in the next administration.

“Before asking me for help, I am going to ask you to provide me specific and concrete evidence of your loyalty to Trump,” he wrote.

“If you cannot provide a lot of that, stop asking me. Political ­appointments require both competency and loyalty.”

The scale of Mr Trump’s victory in the electoral college rose over the weekend, as Associated Press declared that he had won Arizona, which Mr Biden narrowly carried in 2020. The call confirmed that Mr Trump had won all seven swing states and gained 312 electoral votes; 270 are required to win the White House.

Republican senator John Barrasso, of Wyoming, said Mr Trump had won a mandate on ­immigration and on attempting to tackle inflation.

“We need to start with the ­people who are felons,” he told NBC, of the expected mass deportation program. “People who are on the terrorist watchlist, people who have been convicted in other countries of murder and rape. ­People who are committing crimes in this country. That’s the place to start, and that’s where President Trump is about to start.”

The American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration Washington think-tank, has estimated the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation at $US315bn, not including “the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to ­remove over 13 million people in a short period of time”.

It said no previous deportation program had managed more than half a million people in a year. “There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass ­detention as an interim step.”

It noted that “the entire US prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people”.

Tom Homan, the former acting head of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency who Mr Trump named late on Sunday to lead his deportation program, has dismissed suggestions that millions of people would be held in concentration camps. But he told Britain’s The Sunday Times that newly built detention centres would hold those due to be deported and that the US military could play a greater role in transporting them.

“We’re going to concentrate on the worst of the worst,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot different to what the liberal media is saying.”

In an interview with Time magazine in April, Mr Trump ­referred to Eisenhower’s “mass ­deportation of people” and envisioned using the National Guard and possibly other elements of the military as well.

“I will be complying with court orders,” he said. “And I’ll be doing everything on a very legal basis.

“I have great respect for the ­Supreme Court.”

The Times