Among the many asphyxiating gut punches delivered by Donald Trump’s election, his denigration of immigrants and pledge to deport them en masse stand out. Trump has now signaled that he will move to deport as many as three million immigrants after he takes office, and roll back Barack Obama’s executive action protecting more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.



The guesswork under way over the damage Trump might wreak, from decimating what remains of the social safety net to trashing precarious efforts to curb global warming, is chilling. The promised attack on immigrants suggests we will see communities terrorized by what can only be fairly described as a police state.

What’s received little attention is that Trump would probably use tools developed by the Bush and Obama administrations to orchestrate mass deportations. Over the last 16 years, the federal government has used local police and jails as a key tool to orchestrate mass deportations – and that’s precisely what Trump plans to do on a more frightening scale than ever.

One tool, Obama’s favorite, is Secure Communities, now called the Priority Enforcement Program. It links an FBI database comprising fingerprints entered by local law enforcement bodies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Under Obama, Secure Communities made local arrests the key entry point to a deportation pipeline that removed 2.5 million from the country. Another is 287(g), authorized by Bill Clinton but first implemented under Bush, which deputizes local police and jails to search out undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to a strong immigrant rights movement, Obama curbed both to a limited (and, in the case of Secure Communities, heavily debated) degree after overseeing mass deportations. Trump has clearly stated he will get rid of Obama’s restrictions and embrace both programs with open arms.

Over the last two weeks, the political establishment, tied to Wall Street and indifferent to working people, has received a just share of blame for allowing Trump to come to power. When it comes to immigration, however, that blame is more well deserved than is widely understood.

For years, establishment leaders like Clinton, Bush and Obama have attempted to placate rising nativism on the right instead of confronting it, implementing immigration and border crackdowns. Instead of sating the nativist right’s hunger for enforcement, the establishment has lent credence to their paranoiac fears over criminal immigrants.

Rather than fighting their extreme policy initiatives, the establishment built the right a monstrous deportation machinery that could now be used to utterly monstrous ends – which, frankly, is how they’ve been used all along.

Strangely enough, what sounds so terrifying coming out of Trump’s mouth today is not so different from what Obama, minus the brazen racism, has articulated as policy in recent years.

“Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom that’s working hard to provide for her kids,” said Obama in 2014. “If you meet the criteria, you can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported.”

The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, has noted: “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon.” To extend that analogy on immigration: Obama has provided Trump with fully loaded weapons, bullets and a well-trained army.

The immigration debate at the center of this election has at its core been utterly surreal: Obama and his predecessors’ track record on immigration has been one that should have made Trump proud. He has orchestrated mass deportations. The Border Patrol boasted more than 20,000 agents in 2015 — up from 4,139 agents in 1992 and 9,212 in 2000. There are 700 miles of fencing along a heavily militarized border where human rights abuses are rampant.

Because Obama was a Democrat, he was susceptible to pressure from an emboldened immigrants rights movement led by young people – a movement that Trump will be proud to include on his enemies list. That movement won historic victories protecting the Dreamers, undocumented Americans brought to this country as children, and another executive action protecting the parents of citizens.

The former could very well be overturned by Trump. The latter is held up in court thanks to an evenly divided supreme court which, thanks to Trump’s electoral college win and Republican obstruction, will probably tilt right hard right once again.

There is, however, something that Obama can do to help thwart Trump and do penance for his own immigration sins. In 2011, the Obama administration, after sending sharply and misleadingly conflicted messages, told states and localities that sharing fingerprints with Ice was essentially mandatory. Immigrant rights activists are campaigning for him to reverse course and make the program voluntary. If Obama does so, Trump will have to explicitly make the program mandatory once again in order to implement mass deportations. Then, localities and states can sue in court to stop him.



“The Obama Administration has options to prevent a crisis of its own creation,” as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network put it in a memo sent to the White House on Wednesday.

The political establishment, Obama included, bears responsibility for Trump’s rise and Obama should take action to limit the damage. It’s up to the Americans who are now protesting about the coming Trump presidency to make him do so.