WASHINGTON — The remaining top Republican presidential candidates are vowing to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants if elected. Some immigration experts question whether such a policy would deter many undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country or could be executed.

What You Need To Know

  • The Republican presidential candidates' promises of mass deportations for undocumented immigrants were front and center Wednesday night in debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, as well as former President Donald Trump’s town hall

  • DeSantis went a step further by accusing Trump of not being aggressive enough in deporting people

  • Some immigration experts question the wisdom and practicality of dramatically increasing the number of removals, given that there are 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S.

Republican presidential candidates are making President Joe Biden’s handling of the southern border one of their biggest campaign issues. Their promises of mass deportations for undocumented immigrants were front and center Wednesday night in the CNN debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, as well as former President Donald Trump’s Fox News town hall.

“You have to deport them, and the reason you have to deport them is they’re cutting the line. You’ve got people who have done this and tried to go through the right way. You can’t have them go and jump the line,” said Haley, a former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador. 

“We are going to have the largest deportation effort in the history of our country. We’re bringing everybody back to where they came from. We have no choice,” Trump said. 

DeSantis went a step further by accusing Trump of not being aggressive enough in deporting people.

“He also promised record deportations. Donald Trump deported fewer people than Barack Obama did when he was president. Biden’s let in 8 million people just in four years. They all have to go back,” DeSantis said. 

The numbers show that the Biden administration has been removing and expelling more people in the past two years than in any year of the Trump administration. More than 1 million people were removed in both 2023 and 2022.

Some immigration experts question the wisdom and practicality of dramatically increasing the number of removals.

“The largest number of removals occurred in the last several years, and that amounts to about 1.2 million. We have, in this country, about 11 million people that are unauthorized, that don’t have a legal status, so it is not realistic to imagine that those people could all be removed. It would be both a humanitarian and an economic disaster.” said Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. immigration policy program with the think tank Migration Policy Institute.

“Most of the people would have a right to a hearing. There are not nearly sufficient judges and immigration court resources for those hearings to take place. And then it is also an issue of locating people,” she continued.

Meisnner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration, said such rhetoric around mass deportations also ignores the reality that many undocumented immigrants have lived in the U.S. for years, even decades. Some were brought to the U.S. as young children.

“It has a very troubling psychological effect on people who have made lives in this country, even though they don’t have a legal status. And it’s not to be defended that they don’t have a legal status, but the reality on the ground is that we haven’t done anything about it as a country for a very long time,” Meisnner said. 

Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for further comment and to clarify on how he would carry out mass deportations.  

Both Trump and DeSantis have lauded the military-style tactics of the Eisenhower administration that removed Mexican nationals, but experts say some U.S. citizens were swept up in that effort as well.