MASS DEPORTATIONTrump Could Do a Mass Deportation. We’ve Done It Before.
Historical examples suggest that enacting forced relocation, internment, and deportation is nowhere near the longshot many experts believe. In a second term, the biggest challenge for Trump’s mass-deportation agenda would likely not be legal — the courts cannot be counted on to stand in his way— but logistical and monetary.
A few days the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, the New York Times published an article in which officials who served in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations were quoted questioning the political, logistical, and legal viability of the GOP’s platform proposal calling for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The tone of the piece and the views of the experts cited evinced a pre-Trump-era mindset about what the former president and his subordinates could do. Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, told the Times, “It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years.”
But historical examples suggest that enacting forced relocation, internment, and deportation is nowhere near the longshot many experts believe.
Consider the Alien Friends Act of 1798, which, as attorney and legal history scholar Wendell Bird notes in his book Criminal Dissent, gave President John Adams and his successors “virtually unchecked power” to “select and deport aliens.” The law’s passage caused many French citizens living in America and guilty of no crime to self-deport even before being formally targeted by the Adams administration. As Bird explains, “While these self-deportations were not ordered under the open-ended terms of the Alien Act, they occurred because of that law and would not have occurred in its absence.”
Bird documents how others were targeted for deportation and expelled—and in each of the known cases, the grounds were vague or spurious. The chilling effect on free speech and association was profound, and it ultimately produced a political backlash that hastened the demise of the Federalist party.
The experience did not, however, discredit the idea of politically motivated deportations, relocations, or removals. Just over forty years later, another president would use federal power to drive an entire groups of people over a thousand miles from their land and homes.
In this case, it was tens of thousands of American Indians who were moved, sometimes literally at gunpoint. As University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt recounts in Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, “the United States subjected Native Americans to a formal state-administered process that produced censuses, property lists, land plats, expulsion registries, commutation certificates, and the like, all culminating in a journey, by foot, wagon, or steamboat, to lands west of the Mississippi.”
