President-elect Donald Trump has been busy all week rolling out the the members of his new administration. There are three names that stand out for the probable effectiveness of their choices in their mission: South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan for “border czar” and top Trump advisor, Stephen Miller for White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.

While the rest of the administration may sputter and argue, that might not be the case when it comes to enforcing Trump’s dark immigration plan. Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be terribly effective working together. The only limitation they are likely to face is the extent to which the public will authorize activities in their name.

In his new dual role, Miller will define the general contours of American immigration policy. Homan will likely be responsible for determining the operational details of Miller’s plans. And Noem will be responsible for implementing those policies and carrying out Trump’s promised deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

One of the few holdovers from Trump’s early days, Miller was a speechwriter and senior adviser under Trump during his first term. At the end of Trump’s term, he had a huge influence on immigration policy and helped purge the ranks of civil servants he judged that it was not aggressive enough to deter border crossings. He helped shape many of the harshest immigration policies implemented by Trump, including the so-called Muslim travel ban and the use of title 42 completely close the border.

His main skill has always been taking Trump’s worst impulses toward immigrants and making them almost palpable to moderate listeners. But with a title to match his ambitions and a direct line to Trump, he won’t have much to stop him from being as extreme as he had always hoped. Among the the projects that Miller leads are mass deportation camps to hold people collected in ICE workplace sweeps while they are processed for deportation and Title 42 reinstatement at the border.

In addition to cracking down on undocumented immigrants, it also aims to limit immigration. Miller supported a end of birthright citizenship and pledged to “energize” its efforts to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. He also prepared to end parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua and allow Temporary Protected Status protections to expire for more than 800,000 people.

While Miller draws up the plans, it will likely be Homan who coordinates their execution. Trump has indicated he would like to see the military participate in forced withdrawal plans, which would require buy-in from the Pentagon and a likely transfer of money from defense programs to pay for it. an increase in detention centers. There will be legal challenges that the Justice Department will have to defend against. Homan would be the point person to make sure everyone stayed on the same page.

It should be noted that Homan’s work, such as it is, currently exists only as two words on paper, as there is no job title of “border czar” in the federal system nor a reserve resources on which it can draw. It’s also fun to remember that he was promised, but never granted, a similar role in the first Trump administration. But Homan has experience necessary to fulfill Miller’s wishes. He was hired to run ICE’s deportation service before becoming its director and implementing Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy on child separation.

Meanwhile, Noem’s rise speaks to the extent to which all politics is now national. Leading South Dakota gave him little contact with the immigration system. According to the Migration Policy Institutein 2022, only 3.5% of the state’s population was foreign-born, far less than in many parts of the country. But Noem has been extremely vocal about the supposed “invasion” in progress on the southern border, enthusiastically embracing Trump’s narrative and carrying out actions such as deploying National Guard members to the Texas-Mexico border.

She would also be the only one of the three with the legal authority to implement these deportation plans — or the money from Congress to do so. Immigration policy will be entirely top-down with Noem in place, moving from Miller to Homan to Noem’s orders to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to carry them out. It doesn’t matter if she herself has no political experience, as long as she’s willing to be a leading figure in the White House and Senate Republicans are willing to confirm her.

There is still logistical problems this will have to be overcome if Miller’s expulsion plan comes to fruition. Homan said this week that he would double ICE’s presence in sanctuary cities like New York if necessary, but ICE already finds itself short-staffed. There is also a shortage of immigration judges, whose courts face a huge backlog of cases. But all this assumes that the administration has an interest in being efficient and precise in the process of forcibly evicting millions of people from their homes.

Let us not forget that the family separation policy was a humanitarian disaster. The conditions in which the families were detained were terrible, surpassed by the lack of care of which only failure to keep records by the administration. DHS said in a report this year that there were still 1,360 children “without confirmed regroupings” with their families. We might call him incompetent if the goal had been to provide humane refuge for detained migrants or to expedite their processing in the immigration system. But that wasn’t the point. The goal was to make other migrants too afraid to cross the border.

Likewise, in this case, the goal is not to be efficient or precise. Miller probably doesn’t care how long people might have to wait in hastily constructed camps before being deported. There is a good chance that some citizens will be arrested and forced to prove their right to stay in the country. Homan has suggested avoiding family separations by expelling entire familiesproblematically implying that children born in America would also be illegally deported.

There is no way to carry out the type of operation that Miller and his associates envision from an ethical or human perspective – and that’s why they won’t try. In practice, it will instead be a deliberately cruel attack on human rights and dignity. But mass deportations don’t have to be done well for Trump’s vision to become a reality. Just do it.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com