President-elect Donald Trump is moving aggressively on mass deportation, installing two of the most strident anti-immigrant voices in his circle in key positions.

Their selection sets the stage for the administration to take the hardest possible line on Trump’s signature issue: vastly reducing the number of immigrants in this country. What’s coming will be ugly.

Tom Homan, former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the first Trump White House, will be the new border czar. Stephen Miller, the architect of such brutal policies as the Muslim travel ban and the family separation policy that put kids in cages, returns in an even more powerful role: deputy chief of staff for policy.

Together, these two are expected to swiftly conduct a sweep that Miller said would start “on Inauguration Day.”

What could be more fitting to kick off a second Trump term — all the majesty and pomp of the inaugural against a backdrop of Border Patrol agents dragging off immigrants in a raid?

Then came the topper. Trump loyalist, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, was announced as his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem, who reportedly was on the short list of Trump’s potential vice presidential picks until she decided to publicize shooting and killing her dog, has remained a staunch supporter. She has little to no experience in dealing with the border, other than a bit of performative wall-building back in May when she dispatched her state’s National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border.

In a preview of things to come, Homan delivered a startlingly blunt message on 60 Minutes nine days before the election. Asked if deportations could avoid splitting up families, he replied: “Families can be deported together.” In other words, undocumented parents and their American-born children. Something like this would almost certainly be challenged in court. Still, given the growing number of Trump-appointed judges and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the outcome is unpredictable.

Even before Trump’s victory, Homan promised to “run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen.” And he knows how to do it. He served under President Barack Obama as head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, overseeing more than 920,000 deportations in three years. In 2015, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service for his enforcement efforts.

Under Trump, Homan executed the family separation policy that Miller helped birth. Exceptional in its cruelty, the policy separated more than 5,500 children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. As of April 2024, more than 1,400 minors still had not been reunited with their parents.

Illegal immigration has bedeviled presidents for decades. Most were torn because they found genuine value in the dynamism and renewal immigrants bring, but they were also compelled to enforce limits.

President Bill Clinton deported 12 million undocumented immigrants over his two terms, including more than 5 million in his last three years. President George W. Bush deported 10 million over 8 years.

Even Obama deported 5.2 million immigrants over his two terms. Unlike Clinton and Bush, who relied more heavily on informal “returns” that shipped immigrants back across the border, Obama concentrated on removals, which involve court orders and penalties for re-entry. Focusing on recent arrivals and serious criminals, Obama removed far more undocumented immigrants than either of his predecessors through those means, earning him the nickname “deporter-in-chief.”

But none demonized immigrants the way Trump has, making them the scapegoats for every societal ill. His predecessors followed the rule of law and due process as a matter of course. Those are important distinctions, especially now, because Trump and the toxic duo of Homan and Miller are already searching for every conceivable way to restrict both illegal and legal immigration.

Homan has also signaled that he intends to bring back a disruptive and traumatizing enforcement tactic that had fallen into disuse: large-scale workplace raids. Homan has said the raids would be conducted in “humane” ways. I witnessed many raids as an immigration reporter in Southern California years ago, and they were anything but humane. What they do — very effectively — is create chaos and fear among immigrant communities, cause severe labor disruptions for employers— often smaller businesses, contractors, and farmers — and lead to devastation for those left behind.

In an interview on Fox News’ Fox and Friends on Monday, Homan had a message for Democratic governors who have the temerity to say they will protect their states.

“If you’re not going to help us, get the hell out of the way, ‘cause we’re gonna do it,” Homan said. “We may have to double the agents we send,” he said, but “we are going to do the job.”

Miller has floated the idea of using the National Guard to assist in roundups and local law enforcement. To speed up removals, Trump has talked of using a law typically reserved for times of war and was last employed to remove Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II. He also has threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that refuse to cooperate with deportations.

Ironically, one of the earliest targets of the Trump administration may be a group of immigrants that is here legally. More than 530,000 migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are here under a special sponsorship program. Those four countries had previously been among the main drivers of illegal immigration in recent years. Created by President Joe Biden in 2022, the program became infamous during the campaign amid false stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “eating the pets” of other residents. Trump said he considered the program illegal. (It’s not and has been upheld in federal court.)

Biden said in October he would not renew the status of these immigrants, which leaves them with few legal options under the new administration. Dismantling the program and jettisoning those under its protection would get Trump halfway to his goal of deporting 1 million. Those immigrants, of course, are working and contributing to their communities. None of that matters to this administration, which seeks only to stoke hatred against those Trump has called “vermin” and said are “poisoning the blood of this country.”

Polls show that a majority of Americans are convinced that immigration is out of control and affecting too many parts of their lives. But are they prepared for the pain and cruelty this administration will inflict as it carries out its dystopian vision of America “for Americans only”?

Our economy's dirty little secret is that it depends on the cheap labor that undocumented immigrants provide. Up to 1 in 5 construction workers is undocumented, as are up to a fourth of all agricultural workers. Undocumented migrants work in food service, maintenance, cleaning, and retail. But they represent more than some faceless army of low-paid laborers. They live among us as neighbors, friends, and co-workers. They go to church, build community, and dream for themselves and their children.

Once they’re gone, we may find that we need them more than we realized.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter.

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