Experts question feasibility of Trump's mass deportation promise

Experts agree it’s not clear how many people the U.S. realistically could deport and who. There’s an estimated quarter-million unauthorized immigrants living in Arizona, nearly a third of whom have lived in the state for 20 years or more.

Julia Gelatt, with the Migration Policy Institute, said the easiest way for the government to ramp up deportation of unauthorized immigrants is to expand the pipeline from local law enforcement to federal immigration enforcement.

“Most people who are deported are identified by local law enforcement because they're arrested for a crime, whether that's something relatively minor, like driving without a license, to something very major, like a murder,” she said. “It's a lot harder and more expensive for immigration enforcement to find someone at their home or out in the community and identify them as someone who can be removed from the United States.”

And so states, and even counties, where local law enforcement cooperate with immigration agents, are places where people are more likely to be deported than places where there’s little cooperation between local and federal law enforcement.

Gelatt said, as well, migrants from Mexico and Central America are more likely to be deported, since their country of origin is closer, and the U.S. has repatriation agreements with them.

“It's easy to fill up a bus or a plane full of people to send back,” she said. “There are countries that don't accept deportees or accept only very small numbers.”

Deportations also cost money — for staff, detention beds, flights and buses.

University of Arizona Associate Professor of Economics Evan Taylor said there's a huge fiscal cost of deportations.

“We already have a federal government that's trillions — something like $30 trillion in debt, so definitely, from a fiscal perspective, I think it would be kind of a massive undertaking to do this,” he said. “So from that perspective, that's resources we're spending on this versus spending on something else, like building roads.”

Another question is how mass deportation would affect the economy. An estimated 157,000 unauthorized immigrants work in Arizona.

“So something like 5% of employed workers in the state of Arizona are undocumented immigrants,” Taylor said. “So if there was hypothetically mass deportation of all those people that would be a major hit to the Arizona labor force especially in construction, agriculture, service sector where a lot of these immigrants are employed.”

Gelatt, with the Migration Policy Institute, said removing any workers from the U.S. economy can have negative impacts on employers, on the price of goods and services, and on the economy.

“Right now, in the US we have low fertility rates,” she said. “We're really dependent on immigration for the ongoing growth of our labor force, especially in industries where immigrants are concentrated in agriculture and construction, in cleaning and maintenance of buildings.”

The legal route to mass deportations is also not clear. Gelatt said immigrants have the right to contest their deportation, and there's a backlog of 3.7 million cases in immigration courts. People are waiting years for their case to be heard, and even when it is, they can file for asylum or other forms of protection against deportation.

Laura Belous, an attorney with the Florence Immigrants and Refugee Rights Project, said that during Trump’s first administration, the legal community successfully challenged many immigration policies.

But she said in Arizona advocates are concerned that new deportation efforts, coupled with a voter-passed law that gives the state immigration enforcement power, could lead to racial profiling and family separation.

“I think that's also going to kill engagement at schools and hospitals and churches and civic groups,” she said. “So we're concerned, but we're doing our best to work with community leaders and get folks prepared, and also lawyers and national organizations, so we will be ready.”

The part of the new law that would require local law enforcement to arrest undocumented migrants and state judges to deport some of them is currently on hold while a similar measure in Texas is litigated.