In 2011 I wrote an article called “Mass Deportation: How It Would Look” for the website Renew America. It was speculative; only the most rock-ribbed border hawks were talking about it. There was wishful thinking as well. I didn’t want then, and don’t want now, my country overrun with Third World cast-offs and undesirables. Especially now, given the known terrorist element found within the current migratory hordes.
The discussion at the time—the third year of Barack Obama’s first term—centered around the need for sane immigration policy, control of the border, and how to humanely and fairly process the illegal aliens who were already in the country. It was a problem, not a crisis.
Thirteen years later, and illegal immigration is a certifiable crisis. Nobody denies there’s an invasion afoot, and the conservative consensus is that Democrats are importing voters they hope will ultimately replace the votes they can’t get from the American populace. It’s so bad, with Election Day 2024 looming, that even the leftist braintrust around Trojan “Husk” Joe Biden is forced by daunting poll numbers to float a last-ditch border proposal.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is vowing to implement the biggest mass deportation in the history of the country if elected. What in 2011 was an extreme authoritarian dreamscape, has become a viable campaign promise.
Here’s an excerpt from the 2011 piece: “Mass demonstrations and riots would occur, making the protestations of the Occupy Wall Street movement look tame. But the National Guard, I.C.E, the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security and all levels of law enforcement would have their marching orders. As the date of implementation came and went, surgical, prioritized round-ups in areas of known immigrant concentration would commence. It is unlikely large groups would be rounded up simultaneously, but by process of forced attrition the ranks of the undocumented would begin to thin.”
The final sentence here references the unfortunate optics of mass round-ups. Imagine a fleet of buses parked on a vacant lot in Houston, geared-up not to disperse illegal immigrants into far-flung U.S. states, but waiting for detained individuals who’d then be herded aboard, driven south, and deposited into the country that allowed them to cross over in the first place, Mexico.
The progressive-leftist wing of the Democrat Party that now controls the party would be apoplectic, and their cry of “Nazism” would peal forth with new resonance. But if Trump does get elected, and is somehow able to overcome the lawfare surely waged against his mass deportation policies, those same left-wingers would have only themselves to blame for the societal carnage. In the hands of elected officials like “Border Czar” Kamala Harris and appointed apparatchiks like “Minister of Voter Replacement” Alejandro Mayorkas, the immigration/border situation has gone from national problem to sovereign crisis.
One thing everybody agrees on: Trump is the only politician to openly call for mass deportations and see his poll numbers go up. That’s what happens when a problem metastasizes into a crisis.
A final excerpt from my 2011 article: “Even if only .1 percent of the 11 million immigrants offer violent resistance to deportation, that equates to 11,000 individuals willing to go down fighting on American soil. Such cells would become magnets for not only illegals but disaffected ‘freedom fighters’ in solidarity with the largely Hispanic resistance. And certainly, such last-stand cells would attract homegrown and foreign terrorists for whom the issue of illegal immigration is distinctly ancillary to their core objectives.”