Donald Trump vows to keep his anti-immigration campaign promise when he takes office, whatever the cost. “There is no price,” he says. said NBC News on Thursday, saying he had “no choice” but to go ahead with his plan to carry out what he described as “the largest deportation effort in American history.”

“We obviously need to make the border strong and powerful,” the president-elect said.

As during his first successful bid for the White House, Trump has made immigration a defining issue of his 2024 campaign. He and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have proposed ending birthright, returning Haitians who are legally in the United States under temporary protected status, and reinstating travel bans, among other plans. And while Trump suggested to NBC News that “we want people to come to our country” legally, he also suggested restricting legal immigration.

But the centerpiece of his anti-immigration agenda – this cycle’s “wall building” – is mass deportation: “We have become a dumping ground for the world,” Trump said in his speech. dark address at the Republican National Convention this summer. “They won’t get away with this for long,” Trump told his supporters, vowing to wage a deportation campaign “even bigger” than Dwight Eisenhower’s brutal “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s.

The logistics of Trump’s plan remain unclear: As of 2022, there were an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to a Department of Homeland Security report. estimate. During Trump’s first term, as CNN said Catherine E. Shoichet note On Thursday, his administration carried out 1.5 million evictions, at a cost of nearly $11,000 each. Vance said in August that he would like to deport a million undocumented immigrants a year, just as a “start”: “Then we can go from there,” he said. said ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

How could a second Trump administration intensify its deportation campaign to this extent? Vance proposed a “sequential approach”; anti-immigration fanatic Stephen Miller has suggested the military would be involved; and Trump himself propose invoking the two-century-old Alien Enemies Act, which the United States government had previously used to detain nationals of German, Italian and Japanese descent during World War II. But details, as is typically the case with Trump, are scarce.

Which doesn’t mean it won’t move forward anyway. While Trump’s stupidity and laziness sometimes derailed the ugly ambitions of his first term, his haphazard execution often served to make bad policy even worse, particularly when it came to immigration measures like his immigration agenda. separation of families, whose cruelty was exacerbated by the chaos of its implementation. The complex logistical challenges posed by Trump’s anti-immigration fantasies may not pose obstacles to their realization, as some have. suggested; they could, on the contrary, make their implementation even more reckless.