On the campaign trail, president-elect Donald Trump promoted a rallying cry demanding mass deportations of as many as 20 million people – a hyper-inflated statistic that exceeds the estimated total of undocumented population in the US by millions, suggesting he might go so far as to round up immigrants in the country who have legal protections, too.
But despite the US already having the largest immigration detention system worldwide, mass deportations on that scale would require an enforcement regime that doesn’t yet exist. Case in point: in Trump’s first term, authorities removed about 1.5 million people over four years, leveling a devastating toll on the families involved but falling far short of the mass repatriations Trump had aspired to back then.
