This is an adapted excerpt from the November 18 episode of “The ReidOut.”
On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump said he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Trump has promised to start the deportations on his own very first day at the office.
“On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” he told the crowd at his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City last month.
Trump talks a lot about chasing ‘criminals’, but what does that mean in practice? Technically, you’ve broken the law if you cross the border illegally. Are all those people who crossed the border under Trump at risk of being deported?
Of the 130 million households in the United States, about 5.6 million include undocumented immigrants, according to data from the Pew Research Center. That’s 1 in 25 families in America who know and love someone who is undocumented. This is not siloed.
In response to Trump’s pledge to deploy the military to help with his deportation efforts, American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero said his organization is already working with blue states to map their response to bring.
Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Maura Healey of Massachusetts and JB Pritzker of Illinois are all discussing how they will protect their undocumented communities. They know that one of the things that Trump does very well is unleashing terror against his opponents, and in this case it will be blue states.
We’ll see something very different happen in red states like Texas. There will likely be huge investments in detention camps. The mass deportation of millions will become a source of income. Some of these private, for-profit centers are already under investigation for forcing inmates to work for wages as low as $1 a day – essentially indentured servitude.
Under the incoming Trump administration, millions of undocumented immigrants and those who love them could suffer while others earn millions of dollars from the sweat and labor of broken families.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
