Trump says his mass deportation plan has ‘no price tag’ as he prepares to boot millions from the country
Trump’s militarized removals could cost billions while upending the economy and ripping families and communities apart
Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history,” deploying federal, state and local law enforcement to arrest, jail and deport potentially millions of people living in the country without legal permission.
A militarized operation would depend on detention camps to hold people marked for removal, and would invoke a centuries-old law previously used to detain Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
President-elect Trump told NBC News on Thursday, two days after defeating his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, that he has “no choice” but to implement large-scale deportations when he takes office in January.
“It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
He told NBC News that he wants to “make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country.”
“And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in,” he said. Using the full force of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, detain and deport millions of people living in the US without legal permission could cost more than $967 billion over 10 years, according to the American Immigration Council.
That is nearly the same amount that undocumented immigrants pay in federal, state and local taxes within a 10-year period, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022, the group found. For every 1 million undocumented immigrants, public services receive $8.9 billion in tax revenue. Those immigrants, despite paying into government services like healthcare and Social Security, are not eligible for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment