Inside Trump’s ‘Nightmare’ Plans For Mass Deportation Camps

Five years ago, Kris Kobach, Kansas’ former secretary of state, announced on Fox Business Network that, in order to quickly deport undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, the Trump administration would need “camps.”

Or, as he also put it, “processing towns.”

The U.S. government owns “thousands of empty mobile home trailers,” . “A second Trump administration could detain hundreds of thousands of people, but it does not have the ability or the capacity to move them out of the country as fast as ICE, the National Guard and local law enforcement can bring them in. Expect to see families behind barbed wire in overcrowded camps, desperate U.S.-citizen children looking for missing immigrant parents, and U.S. citizens swept up in immigration raids.”

To get a sense of what future deportees might find in these camps, just look to historic conditions in immigration detention ― particularly at processing centers near the border, where migrants are sent after being arrested by Border Patrol.

In 2019, during a period of more frequent migration, the government erected tent cities to detain new arrivals. Conditions were poor. At one point, government lawyers argued that the administration wasn’t required to provide soap to children. Squalid living arrangements and dangerous overcrowding were common.

At an El Paso Border Patrol facility, border agents told government investigators that “some of the detainees had been held in standing-room-only conditions for days or weeks.” Separately, investigators observed detainees standing on toilets “to make room and gain breathing space.” Multiple children died after being detained while entering the United States, including several who died from the flu.

“The way they were treated in the facilities was horrific, horrific. Total medical neglect,” the medical director of a non-governmental migrant shelter near the border told HuffPost recently, recounting people they treated who’d passed through the processing centers in late 2018 and 2019. “It was like watching ‘Schindler’s List.’”

Perhaps most troubling to activists and advocates concerned with migrants’ rights is the rightward shift both parties have taken on the border in recent years.

After all, former President Barack Obama removed more people from the country in each of his two terms than Trump did in his one term, earning himself the nickname “deporter-in-chief.”

There are some caveats to that statistic, though. For one thing, Trump dramatically reduced legal immigration. For another, the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the number of people arriving at the border, both because fewer people made the trip to the United States and because Trump cited the pandemic to invoke a rule called Title 42, which allowed Border Patrol agents to turn away even those seeking asylum.

The Trump administration also created the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy — formally called the “Migrant Protection Protocols” — to force certain migrants seeking asylum to await their court dates south of the border, frequently in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. Trump has said he would pursue this policy again as president.

President Joe Biden has opened legal pathways for migrants seeking to enter the United States, and the overall number of border crossings during this presidency has been much higher than during the Trump administration — though Biden has also removed far more people from the country than Trump did.

Biden has also recently dramatically limited asylum rights at the border — echoing some of the Trump administration’s legal strategies — by placing new restrictions on the ability to pursue asylum that are triggered on the number of unauthorized crossings per day. The policy prevents “countless” asylum seekers from exercising their right to seek safe haven in the United States, an ongoing lawsuit from immigrant rights groups alleges.

Since Biden implemented that asylum cap, the Kino Border Initiative, a migrant aid program with locations in the United States and Mexico, has received hundreds of would-be asylum seekers at its Mexican clinic who were turned around and expelled back into Mexico at the U.S. border.

“For the last eight years or so, we have been consistently — with different policies — blocking people’s access to asylum,” Pedro De Velasco, the group’s director of education and advocacy, said of U.S. authorities.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, has played up her experience as a “border state prosecutor” in campaign ads, a sign she’s likely to continue Biden’s more restrictive border stances. And, like Biden, she supported a bipartisan border bill that would have expanded some legal immigration pathways while also limiting asylum rights.

Still, there’s little doubt that a return to Trump would shift U.S. immigration and border policy even further to the right. Project 2025, an ideological handbook for a second Trump term authored by scores of former Trump administration officials ― though technically not part of the GOP candidate’s campaign platform ― offers hints at what could be to come.

On top of laying out plans to severely limit legal migration, the Project 2025 playbook offers several steps to weaken the protections offered by “sanctuary cities,” which, broadly defined, limit local police departments’ ability to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Those sanctuary policies are a major reason Trump wasn’t able to deport as many people as Obama.

Project 2025 calls for a nationwide detention standard that “allow[s] the flexibility to use large numbers of temporary facilities such as tents.” It also reiterates a goal of Trump’s first term — ending the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 consent decree that places limitations on the detention of migrant children.

Put together, the overlapping arrest, imprisonment and deportation operation imagined for a second Trump term would, like Miller has said, be a historic feat of logistics — and, potentially, a new frontier in cruelty. And there appears to be plenty of other plans being developed behind the scenes.

Russ Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s presidency, was a key co-author of Project 2025. He was also policy director of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee. And he’s in line for a high-ranking post if Trump wins a second term.

He recently told undercover reporters that he was working on about “350 different documents” full of plans for the next administration — including on mass deportations.

“You may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said in a secretly recorded meeting. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

The plans won’t be public, Vought said — but rather, “very, very close hold.”