Removing all the country’s undocumented migrants is easier said than done but the wartime forced relocation of 110,000 Japanese Americans offers some clues

A confrontation between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in Iowa on Tuesday may be remembered most for Trump’s decision to throw Ramos from his news conference. Trump said Ramos was “out of line” for speaking out of turn.



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But the confrontation also yielded a significant policy question with urgent implications for the Trump candidacy and, seemingly – given that Trump is currently a double-digit frontrunner in the polls – for the US as a whole.

A central plank of Trump’s immigration plan calls for deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants currently living in the United States, and then repatriating the “good ones” back to the US again. After regaining entry to the news conference, Ramos asked Trump how that would work.

“How are you going to deport 11 million people?” Ramos said. “By train, by bus? Are you going to bring the army?”

Trump replied that the process would be “very humane” and that it would work because he was “a great manager”.

“We’re going to do it in a very humane fashion. Believe me. I have a bigger heart than you do. We’re going to do it in a very humane fashion,” Trump said.

“You know what it’s called? Management … I’m a great manager. I know how to manage things. I hire unbelievable people. What we’re doing here will work great.

“Once I win, you’re gonna see things happen.”

Trump’s proposed roundup and mass deportation of the nation’s undocumented immigrants represents a substantial logistical challenge.

If history is a guide, the effort would consume significant budgetary and law enforcement resources, could precipitate a national social crisis and might expose the country to reparations claims for decades to come.

The last large-scale roundup of US residents by the federal government, the internment of people of Japanese descent during the second world war, ultimately encompassed only about 110,000 arrestees, most of whom originally lived in a few major cities on the west coast. They were moved into camps in western states – not across an international border.

There are 100 times that number of undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data, and the migrants are not regionally clustered – they live everywhere.

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Making his challenge even more difficult, Trump has said he would not break up families through forced deportation, instead sending legal US residents outside the country along with undocumented family members (presumably with a right of return).

Trump has not said how he would handle cases in which the legal US residents in question preferred to stay put. In such cases, presumably, the families would be broken up after all, because while Trump is famous for saying “you’re fired!”, no president has the power to tell a US citizen: “You’re deported!”

Families would face excruciating decisions. Would an undocumented migrant from Guatemala take her daughter, whose status in the US might be protected by one of Barack Obama’s executive actions sheltering young migrants, back to Guatemala with her, not knowing whether or when either of them might be allowed to return? Or would mother leave daughter in the United States, in hopes of her finding greater opportunity? How much time would they be given to decide, following the mother’s arrest for being undocumented?

But first, the government would have to identify whom to arrest. Census and employer records and a law enforcement focus on hubs for undocumented migrants could serve to identify early cases, but the process would probably become quickly more difficult – and intrusive. Happily for Trump, a 2012 supreme court ruling on an Arizona law upheld the ability of law enforcement to check the immigration status of people they stop. (Critics of the lawsay it amounts to officially sanctioned racial profiling.)



Big numbers, regional dispersion and civil rights intrusions are not the only challenges that would face President Trump. There is also a problem of the national will. Unlike in the spring of 1942, in the shadow of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there has been no galvanizing event to swing public support behind drastic action against an entire group of residents, in the form of mass arrest and background checks.

As with many issues in US law enforcement, additionally, there would be daunting jurisdictional challenges to overcome. Rogue metropolitan areas that currently serve as “sanctuary cities” – places where immigration status is often overlooked – would have to be brought in line by the federal government. Local police would have to be required to cooperate, in what would be an unprecedented – and constitutionally unfounded – assertion of federal authority.

The effort would face profound budgetary and infrastructure challenges. Municipalities would be stretched to cover police overtime. The state, justice and labor departments as well as federal agencies including the border patrol, immigration and customs enforcement, and citizenship and immigration services, would probably be swamped with identifying, processing and executing actionable cases. There would be an opportunity cost to deferring the other work of those agencies. Potential national guard deployments would tax the military and military families.

Once everybody was arrested, a delicate public relations campaign would be needed to hedge against the risk that images of farm workers in zipties filing on to trains, crying grandmothers, overwhelmed immigration services centers, convoys of buses, or angry employers would provoke more general outrage and civil unrest.

The more humane the effort to move the migrants, the higher housing and transportation costs would rise. The government would probably face legal fees tied to defending civil rights lawsuits, loss-of-livelihood lawsuits, wrongful imprisonment lawsuits, constitutional challenges and more. And any mistake or abuse of rights could expose the government to vast claims for damages. A future federal commission to examine the episode could likewise prove costly.

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The internment of Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent does, however, perhaps hold some useful lessons for Trump’s proposed effort. Here are four:

A small proportion of people will relocate themselves

An estimated 5,000 people of Japanese descent complied with a government request that they “voluntarily evacuate” themselves from designated “military zones” on the Pacific coast to inland states. That ended up being less than 5% of the total people the government decided to move, but it was a start.

Get the US Census Bureau involved

It took more than 50 years before documents emerged to force the US Census Bureau to admit that it had helped with the second world war internment by giving law enforcement agencies names and information about individual Japanese Americans and Japanese living in America. Nowadays, with computers, the Census Bureau would be an even more powerful ally.

Use diverse transportation and public infrastructure

Trucks, buses and trains were used to move Japanese and Japanese Americans to racetracks and fairgrounds before they were placed in prison. There are fewer racetracks and fairgrounds these days, but many more stadiums, and no shortage of buses.

Budget generously for potential reparations

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by Ronald Reagan, no spendthrift, offered a formal presidential apology and $20,000 to every survivor of the internment with contemporary legal status in the United States. That’s about $40,000 in current dollars. Ultimately about 80,000 payouts were made for a grand total of $1.6bn.

“No monetary payments can ever fully compensate loyal Japanese Americans for one of the darkest incidents in American constitutional history,” President George HW Bush said upon signing follow-up legislation to enlarge the reparations fund. “We must do everything possible to ensure that such a grave wrong is never repeated.”