Could U.S. citizens get caught in Trump’s mass deportation program?

Since Donald Trump’s re-election, many news outlets have covered his proposed mass deportation campaign, in which he promises to deport millions of immigrants to their origin countries. Trump and his incoming administration have been sparse with the logistics, except that the country should expect the resurgence of workplace and home raids. Unclear, however, is how successful this campaign will be given that countries outside of the United States need to agree to accept the people the president-elect wants to deport. It’s not clear that countries such as Mexico are prepared to handle the influx of deportees, especially if non-Mexican nationals are deported to Mexico as well.

What the media has covered less is what will happen to people who are rounded up but whose countries may not accept them. It is no coincidence that on the day after the election, the stocks of private prison companies dramatically rose, with GEO Group’s stock surging 42%, while CoreCivic gained 29%. Rather than a mass deportation campaign, the incoming administration’s efforts may result in a wave of mass incarceration.

Unlike criminal court, immigrants who are detained in prisons and await court deportation proceedings are not legally entitled to legal counsel. If they don’t have the resources to hire an attorney, they will be on their own in prison, with no one advocating for their rights. Immigrants may be subject to lengthy prison stays, possibly with no end in sight, even if they have been productive and law-abiding members of their communities for years.

Moreover, some U.S. citizens will likely meet the same fate. Racial profiling often plays a role in who ends up in the prison-to-deportation pipeline. The system does not always distinguish people by their legal status but by their skin color. Anyone who looks Latino or Latina will be fair game for enforcement officials.

Also, collateral arrests are not uncommon to result from immigration raids. Innocent people, including U.S. citizens or people who have permanent or temporary legal statuses, will end up in prison trying to prove that they are “legal.” The U.S. government deported U.S. citizens of Mexican descent in the 1930s and 1950s in mass deportation campaigns.

In short, it won’t just be immigrants who are warehoused in prisons awaiting deportations that may never materialize. U.S. citizens will end up in a similar situation, especially when we consider that members of the president-elect’s new administration have advocated for denaturalization campaigns, in which citizenship may be taken away from naturalized citizens.

In the summer of 2018, Americans were outraged when they found out about the first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance, family separation policy. This time around, newly appointed Immigration czar Tom Homan has said that they can deport families together to avoid a similar outcry. But what does that mean? It appears the expectation is that the populace gets comfortable with seeing U.S. citizens imprisoned and deported.

About 4.9 million U.S. citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent. These U.S. citizens will be swept up in this mass detention and deportation campaign. If they are old enough, they may have to choose whether to stay in the U.S. while their parents are deported, so long as they can prove their citizenship. All this to say, if Americans were uncomfortable with the practices on display in 2018, we all need to buckle up for what’s coming.

Elizabeth Aranda is a professor of sociology and director of the Im/migrant Well-Being Research Center at the University of South Florida. She is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network and co-founder of the Im/migrant Well-Being Scholar Collaborative.

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