Majority Support Deportations; Vance, Trump Allies Brace for Backlash

As Trump talks up deportation, his allies are bracing for a backlash – the kind Vance foresees, which is to say, like none other. The tumultuous reaction to his last presidency, the charge that he put “kids in cages,” said one former immigration official, “will look like a warmup.”

But with less than two weeks until Election Day, Trump hasn’t faced negative headwinds for his border hawkism. A slim majority of Americans support mass deportation, including many Latinos, have warmed to Trump despite the grim warnings from Vice President Kamala Harris about his proposals.

“We all remember what they did to tear families apart,” Harris said last month at an event hosted by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “And now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history.” Harris warned that a second Trump term would be more extreme than the first.

“Imagine what that would look like and what that would be,” Harris said of deportations. “How’s that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”

And while exact details can be hazy, the promises from Trump are always in the superlative. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told RealClearPolitics that the Republican would not only restore past policies but “implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”

Voters seem to like it, or at least they don’t find the policies objectionable enough to make them object to Trump: A recent USA Today/Suffolk poll found him leading Harris among Latino voters by an 11-point spread, 49% to 38%. President Biden, by comparison, won 59% of that voting bloc and the White House four years ago.

Support for mass deportations, meanwhile, like those that Trump and Vance promise at just about every campaign stop, are popular with a slim majority of Americans. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 56% of all registered voters, a number that includes 27% of Harris voters, favor deportations. According to Vance, the number will change.

During the September interview with Carlson, Vance estimated that “two-thirds of Americans, give or take,” support deportations, calling it “a commonsense issue.” Fast forward though, he cautioned, and “in 18 months,” there will be a deluge of media reports and public opinion polling that shows the opposite, “that actually Americans do not support mass deportations, that Donald Trump is doing all of these terrible things, and he has to stop – it’s inhumane, it’s evil, and the American public don’t support it.”

This wasn’t an argument against deportations. Vance has blamed illegal immigrants, and the porous border policies that allowed them to come here, for everything from a strained social safety net to rising home prices. Instead, the Republican candidate said he was warning that the same pollsters who infamously reported in 2020 that Trump “was going to lose Wisconsin by 17 points,” would churn out polling that warns deportations would sink Republicans.

The stated goal of the Trump-Vance ticket is to remove the more than 20 million illegal immigrants present in the United States. Asked how that would even be possible, the Ohio Republican advocated for “a sequential approach,” telling ABC News “Let’s start with 1 million” – criminals and gang members.

Trump allies agree with that first step. If the former president is serious about his calls for mass deportation, though, and there is no indication he is not, then migrants with criminal records won’t be the only ones caught up in a federal dragnet. There will be adult males, the most common migrants, but also entire families who crossed the border illegally.

“If everybody here illegally is fair game, that doesn’t just mean criminals,” said Ken Cuccinelli of the conservative group Center for Renewing, who previously served as Trump’s Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. He said during an interview with RCP that those with criminal records “will still be the priority.”

Tom Homan would likely work as one of the deportation architects. He served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first half of the Trump administration and continues to be one of the former president’s favorites. “President Trump said himself, we’re going to concentrate on the public safety threats and national security threats,” Homan told RCP before adding, “I’ve been clear. No one’s off table. It’s not okay to enter this country legally – it’s a crime.”

Returned to the Oval Office, Trump would be limited to one term and therefore unencumbered with concerns about reelection, a fact that is expected to lend itself to an aggressive border policy. And after four years in the White House previously, he left behind a more conservative judiciary, including the Supreme Court, that could look on his deportation plans more charitably if challenged in court.

With an eye to his legacy, a source close to the former president predicted that when it comes to curbing illegal immigration, it would be “important to him to be the biggest, to hold the record, and do the most.”

Legal challenges and protests would be sure to follow just as they did the last time Trump was in office. The enduring image of that era: The Crying Girl.

Six years ago, a photo of a 2-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother was patted down by Border Patrol became an avatar for the administration’s unpopular child separation policy and quickly went viral. Time Magazine put the image of the girl on its cover against a red backdrop with Trump towering over her. The caption read, “Welcome to America.” Trump later reversed the child-separation policy. 

Only later did it come to light that the young girl was not separated from her mother, a fact confirmed by both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Honduran deputy foreign minister. But fueled by the sympathetic image, the controversy created a political liability for the administration that managed only several hundred thousand, not millions, of deportations during his presidency.

His ambition for deportation has only grown, and so likely would the political backlash that Vance warned about during his interview with Carlson.

Cuccinelli said that Republicans ought to focus on the legal immigrants who have been disenfranchised by those who break the law rather than go through the process (“it infuriated them”). He also said that his party should emphasize how deporting an illegal workforce “creates opportunity for poor Americans to get not just better jobs, but better wages.”

Of the coming blowback, Homan said, “I don’t care about the backlash; they can backlash all they want.” He sees it as an issue of law and order, pointing, for instance, to the overwhelming majority of asylum cases that get rejected by an immigration judge. “Due process doesn’t mean squat, if at the end of that process, due process isn’t carried out,” he said before adding, “We’ll give you a fair shake in court, but at the end, the decision has to be carried out.”

“What Trump seems to be contemplating is potentially lawful,” Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, told the Associated Press. “There might not be a lot of legal barriers. It is going to be logistically extraordinarily complicated and difficult. The military is not going to like doing it and they are going to drag their feet as much as they can, but it is possible, so it should be taken seriously.”

All that is necessary, Trump allies say, is getting the right team in place. Both Cuccinelli and Homan stressed the need for a White House cabinet marching in lockstep. Putting a border hawk at the Department of Homeland Security would be just the first step. Ahead of a contentious battle over deportations, Homan said that from the State Department to the Department of Justice, the administration needs to be stacked with personnel who share Trump’s vision.

“It needs to be the whole of government, because the whole of government touches the border,” he said.

Trump is leading for now in the polls. If elected, and if he makes good on his deportations, controversy and backlash will surely follow as Vance predicted.