A growing number of law enforcement authorities and Democratic leaders across the country are speaking out about their plans to thwart one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top immigration priorities: Mass deportation. Taking lessons from the first four years of the Trump era, many have vowed to stand their ground and refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in arresting undocumented immigrants. They are also preparing counter-lawsuits to have ready to take the incoming administration to court as soon as officials attempt to begin deportations, which they’ve promised to kick off on day one.

In interviews with Politico published Saturday, prosecutors in six Democratic-led states described their plans to pursue legal challenges against actions Trump may take to carry out his immigration agenda.

These include the potential deployment of the US military domestically to find undocumented people, violations of immigrants’ rights to due process, the withholding of funds from s0-called sanctuary cities, and attempts to deputize the National Guard from red states to carry out arrests and detentions in blue ones.

These prosecutors said they’re also preparing to fight scenarios where the administration tries to send immigration agents into schools and hospitals, or where they withhold federal funds from local law enforcement to force them into compliance with deportation plans.

Earlier this week, Trump reaffirmed his plans to declare a national emergency in order to use federal troops to round-up targets for deportation.

“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in US history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general told Politico, likely referring to the fact that millions of undocumented people live with US citizens, including those whose children were born on American soil. Those children would have to leave the country with deported parents in order for families to stay together. “We’re not going to stand for that,” Platkin added. The goal of top prosecutors across blue states, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association Sean Rankin told ABC News, is to put up a “unified front” against Trump’s immigration agenda.

The Trump administration will inevitably face not only legal but logistical obstacles if they attempt to deliver on the promise of conducting an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. As Dara Lind with the American Immigration Council recently wrote in the New York Times, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year—a fraction of the estimated 11 million living in the country—would cost an annual $88 billion. The limited number of detention beds and immigration courts’ years-long backlog will also inhibit a massive crackdown.

Still, Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar,” who won’t require Senate confirmation, has indicated the administration will push hard against jurisdictions that get in their way. “If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” Homan told Fox News recently, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.” And in fact, Homan has a history of pushing forward extreme immigration policies: As a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official during Trump’s first term, he was the architect of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of parents from their children at the border. To this day, many have not been reunited.

Several Democratic leaders have publicly said they won’t go along with mass deportation efforts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who sued the Trump administration 100 times as attorney general, said they would use “every tool in the toolbox” to protect the state’s population. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island State Police said while they cooperate with ICE, “they are not immigration officers and will not expend any time and resources to support mass deportation efforts.”

Top prosecutors in states like Massachusetts are also trying to dispel the unsupported claims, repeatedly reinforced by Trump, that immigrants are more prone to committing crimes. Instead, according to Politico‘s reporting, they hope to make the case that mass deportation would be bad for the US economy. As I’ve previously reported, the mass deportation of undocumented workers would drastically reduce the GDP, make inflation rise, and even result in fewer jobs available for American citizens.

Continuing the string of MAGA loyalist picks to serve in his administration, President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening tapped Russell Vought to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget—again. Vought, a self-avowed Christian Nationalist and key contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a conservative presidency, led OMB during Trump’s first term, transforming the powerful agency—charged with developing and executing the federal budget, and reviewing executive branch regulations—into a vehicle to deliver on the president’s wildest dreams.

In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, in which the former Fox News host said he was “very likely to run OMB again,” Vought described the agency as the “nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch.” He recounted having provided Trump with a plan to divert funding from the Department of Defense to fund his border wall without congressional approval, a move disavowed by the White House counsel and later ruled illegal. “Presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” Vought said, characterizing it as “the president’s most important tool to deal with the bureaucracy.”

Vought described what kind of person would be best suited to wield the power of this agency on behalf of President Trump. “What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat,” he told Carlson. “They don’t have a fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed and they are no-nonsense in their own ability to know what must be done. And they’re unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda.” Vought also advocated for doing away with the notion of independent agencies, singling out the Department of Justice as a target.

Vought most recently led the conservative Center for Renewing America, which he has described as a “shadow” OMB outside the government. He is a big proponent of reviving an executive order from the final days of the first Trump administration that would upend the federal workforce in service of Trump’s goals. Known as Schedule F, the order would reclassify potentially thousands of career civil servants working in policy-related positions as at-will employees and strip them of job protections, making it easier for political appointees to fire them and fill the openings with candidates hand-picked to support MAGA priorities.

At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”

He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”

In a campaign video from March 2023, Donald Trump laid out his goal to “dismantle the Deep State and reclaim our democracy from Washington Corruption.” Such rhetoric was common in 2016, too. But, this time, his incoming administration has an actionable plan for how to do it.

The idea has existed for years and, as Donald Trump prepares to take office, it will begin on day one: Make thousands of federal career civil servants “at will” employees and, in turn, fireable for not doing what the new administration demands. This will be the first step in a radical reshaping of the federal government.

Repeatedly, the newly elected president has made clear his second term will start with a purge. Once pre-vetted paper-pushers are in place, policies will be pushed through—with less internal resistance from longtime government employees.

To understand the next Trump administration, you have to know about Schedule F.

Signed in the lead-up to the 2020 election and promptly rescinded by the Biden administration, Schedule F would reassign potentially dozens of thousands of policy-related jobs under a new category, effectively stripping career civil servants from employment protections and making it easier for political appointees to fire them.

As I’ve reported before, one of the main champions of Schedule F during Trump’s first was Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, the avowed Christian nationalist tried to turn the influential agency into a tool to pursue the president’s agenda without regard for institutional knowledge and expertise and, at times, in defiance of the law.

Vought and the rest of the [Heritage Foundation’s] Project 2025 administration-in-waiting plan to revive Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potentially, 50,000 federal workers could be affected, their expert roles open to partisan MAGA loyalists ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

The Biden administration has since taken action to strengthen merit-based protections for career civil servants, but some experts and observers have noted the change could end up amounting to little more than a “speed bump” to delay the implementation of Schedule F and prevent the politicization of the workforce. Just last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who could end up overseeing government health agencies under Trump, said as many as 600 National Institutes of Health workers should be fired and replaced.

Plus, Elon Musk seems is in on the act.

This week, President-elect Donald Trump kicked off the process of announcing his picks to staff the incoming administration, selecting a new “border czar,” critical national security roles, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) as attorney general. These were sometimes bizarre choices, but still part of a conventional transitional process: a president saying who would be put up to fill key positions.

In less usual fashion, Trump said “first buddy” Elon Musk and former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the “Department of Government Efficiency”—a non-government advisory entity whose acronym, DOGE, hints at the Tesla billionaire’s favorite memecoin. The commission, pitched by Musk himself, will work alongside the OMB to restructure federal agencies and slash spending and regulations, until the summer of 2026.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump wrote in a statement. According to Musk, who previously advocated for a devastating $2 trillion budget-cut, the group “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!”

Since the announcement, it has raised questions about possible funding sources and the extent of power DOGE can actually exert since federal spending requires congressional approval. But its stated goal of reshaping the executive branch in the image of the MAGA movement signals what is likely to come once Trump takes office: a full-blown war on the federal bureaucracy and career civil servants in Washington.

Late Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump announced one of his top picks to staff the incoming administration: Tom Homan as the “border czar.” Homan “will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin,” Trump posted on social media. “I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long-awaited-for, job.”

There was no surprise there. Having served as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, Homan has been vying for the job since leaving government. He joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow and became a Project 2025 contributor while launching his own anti-immigration enterprise that spread fearmongering about a “border invasion.” Homan has made no secret of his enthusiasm for this new position with the administration. “Trump comes back in January,” Homan bragged at a conservative conference this summer. “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to start a mass deportation campaign on day one and, as Homan has noted, “no one is off the table.” The tough-looking and tough-talking man soon to be tasked with realizing Trump’s promise to detain and remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States has a long career in law enforcement and within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

During the Obama administration, which deported a record number of people, he served as head of the ICE branch charged with arresting and deporting immigrants. For his work, he even won the nation’s highest civil service award. “Thomas Homan deports people,” declared a 2016 profile about him in the Washington Post. “And he’s really good at it.” (Homan reportedly keeps a framed copy of the story in his office.) After taking office, Trump said he had heard people describe Homan as “nasty” looking, and said, “That’s what I’m looking for.”

Homan is the intellectual father of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the border—more than 1,300 of them remain apart even today. “I’m sick and tired [of] hearing about the family separation,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year. “I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right? Bottom line is: We enforced the law.” As far as Homan is concerned, families who crossed the border “chose to separate themselves.”

In interviews, Homan has further underscored his indifference to the human cost of such policies. When asked on 60 Minutes whether it was possible to carry out mass deportation without separating families, he fired back: “Of course there is—families can be deported together.” What this cavalier response conveniently ignores is that millions of US-born children live in mixed-status households with at least one undocumented parent.

Recently, after Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said the state police wouldn’t assist the federal government with carrying out sweeping deportations, Homan suggested politicians in states led by Democrats should “get the hell out of the way.”

“If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” he told Fox News, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.”

In January, former President Donald Trump will reclaim the White House after years of vowing to unleash an unprecedented overhaul of the immigration system in the United States. With mass deportation as a central promise of his campaign, Trump will undoubtedly build on the sweeping crackdown that marked his first term.

He already has promised to restore the travel prohibition on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries (often called the “Muslim ban”). He wants to revive “Remain in Mexico”—which left thousands of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers awaiting court hearings stranded in dangerous border towns. Trump has also taken his anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals to new heights, notably by pledging to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and attacking legal immigration. 

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump.

Trump’s efforts to reshape the immigration landscape are likely to start immediately. Appearing on Fox News the morning after the election, the president-elect’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt celebrated a “resounding victory” and a “mandate to govern as he campaigned to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups and lawyers have been diligently preparing for the possibility of a Trump comeback. Not unlike the first time around, they will inevitably pursue strategic litigation to stop some of the next administration’s harshest, and possibly unlawful, policies. “I’ve sued every president since George W. Bush, including Presidents Obama and Biden,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. “We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court.”

Still, the breadth and depth of Trump’s agenda will have lasting impact, not only on immigrants who will directly bear the brunt of a heightened militarized immigration enforcement environment, but also on all Americans.

Here’s how.

Launch Mass Deportation

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser on immigration. They would attempt to accomplish it by invoking a 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II for the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals—and deploying the full force of law enforcement agencies and the US military in violation of due process rights and the law.

A mass deportation campaign would permanently change the United States. It could lead to racial profiling, the potential separation of families, and the wrongful deportation of Americans and lawful residents. It would also ruin the economy.

The logistical and practical challenges of purging even 1 million people a year are considerable, not to mention the moral and human devastation. But, if realized, a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council found that such a project would cost $967.9 billion over more than a decade. The deportation of immigrant workers who are the backbone of so many critical industries would also break the economy, resulting in an estimated drop of up to 6.8 percent in gross domestic product.

End Birthright Citizenship

Trump promised to sign an executive order on day one to end the long-standing constitutional guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The order would instruct federal agencies to require that at least one parent be a US citizen or lawful permanent resident for a child to be granted automatic citizenship.

“This current policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocate,” Trump has said. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution—and reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions—which states that, with very few exceptions, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Revive the “Muslim Ban”

During his first term, Trump took 472 executive actions in his bid to reshape the immigration system. One of them was the infamous “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” order, which permanently suspended the resettlement of refugees from Syria and barred the entry of travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The policy created instant chaos, sparked international repudiation, and galvanized Americans all over the country.

Trump has vowed to restore the so-called Muslim ban. The original iterations faced repeated legal challenges. Federal appeals courts ruled against the Trump administration, concluding that the executive order’s “stated national security interest was provided in bad faith” and “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” But in a 5–4 decision in June 2018, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out a version of the ban. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issue a proclamation reversing it.

End Immigration Programs

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—granted to those fleeing wars, natural disasters, and other country-specific circumstances—are at risk of losing protection against deportation.

That includes nationals of Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, crafted by a number of administration-in-waiting former officials, specifically calls for the repeal of TPS designations.

While in office, Trump tried to rescind the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields from deportation the undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. There were as many as 535,030 active DACA recipients as of June 2024. Miller has said a second Trump administration would again attack the program, whose fate already lies with the courts. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Michelle Ming, political director at United We Dream, says of the prospect of tens of thousands of young people losing status. “It would destroy families. It would destroy entire communities.”

Roll Back Refugee Resettlement

In a September social media post in which he introduced to concept of remigration, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement.” The first Trump administration dealt a massive blow to the US refugee resettlement program, and it likely wouldn’t be different this time. In September, Trump said he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.”

As president, he set an annual cap of 15,000 refugee admissions. The number of admissions went from 84,994 during President Barack Obama’s last year in office to a record low of 11,814 in 2020. Ultimately, the Trump administration resettled fewer refugees than any other going back at least to the Carter administration. Upon taking the White House, Joe Biden worked to restore the program, resettling 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024—the most in decades.

Restrict Legal Immigration

While Trump has tried to signal that he’s in favor of legal immigration pathways, his allies have been preparing the terrain to severely restrict them. “Decades of ‘we’re not against legal immigration’ will culminate in the largest cut to legal immigration in US history,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, posted on X.

Their plans include severely curbing asylum, ending diversity lottery visas, and doing away with temporary legal programs like parole that have allowed immigrants from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to come to the United States after being vetted and securing a sponsor. They could even resuscitate the public charge rule making it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for visas and green cards.

Immigration lawyers have additionally warned that, in a second Trump administration, visa processing might be subject to delays and increased denial rates. “If Donald Trump is elected president in November 2024,” the National Foundation for American Policy stated, “he should be expected to restrict legal immigration, including green cards and [high-skilled] H-1B visas.”

The Project 2025 agenda contemplates undermining T and U visas for undocumented immigrant victims of trafficking and certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (These temporary protections serve as a powerful tool to encourage victims to report crimes and keep their communities safe.) It also envisions winding down crucial temporary agricultural worker programs.

Projecting a scenario in which Trump’s policies result in less immigration and even more people leaving the United States than entering, a preelection Brookings Institution analysis concluded the GDP in 2025 would be $130 billion lower than under a Harris administration.

---

In 2016, Andrés García fled anti-LGBQT+ violence in his native El Salvador. Until a few years ago, he lived in Virginia without papers. Then, he got flagged by the police over a minor infraction and transferred to the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spent a year in ICE detention. In July 2023, García won his asylum case. Now, he fears the outcome of the US presidential election could make him vulnerable to deportation—and danger back home.

I fled my country because I was escaping. I’m a gay man and back in my country it’s kind of hard to be yourself. You can be incarcerated. You can be killed. We don’t have legislation so that we can say: “You know what, I’m gonna be whatever I want to be and the law is going to protect me.” You don’t have freedom as much as you have here.

So, I came here eight years ago looking for safety and a better life for me and my family. I’ve been living in Virginia since I came to the United States and with my sister for the past couple of years. I did go to school to learn English. I’m the type of person who always tries to contribute and to be better each and every day.

If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

Everything was okay. But then, two or three years ago, I was detained by ICE. I was in detention for over a year and was released in 2023. That just made me feel differently because I saw the injustice in the system. In Virginia, you don’t have the right to legal representation if you’re an immigrant in court. You don’t have anyone to tell you what you can apply for or what your rights are. Not knowing the law, not knowing the language, not knowing anything.

I thought I was going back to my country. I thought I was getting deported. But one day, I was like, you know what? I’m just going to fight. And I saw this poster on the phones. It was about CAIR Coalition [now the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights]. I called them hoping they would take my case. A couple of weeks later, they told me they had good news and had accepted my case. They helped me through the whole process. They gave me not just legal representation, but they helped me establish communication with my family back in my country. They saved my life, pretty much.

In the past, I was scared. I was afraid to make my voice heard because of my [lack of] papers. When we won our asylum case, I thought: “I need to give something back to the community.”

I’ve been attending rallies. [My boyfriend and I] went knocking on doors this past weekend. Now, I’m going back to school on November 16. I’ve always been into interior design and that’s what I want to do.

I’m in a safer place now, but I’m still on the immigration system. I will never get off of the system until I become a citizen. What if Trump’s policies become reality where they are going to deport everybody who has a record? If I get deported, my country is in a state of emergency where you don’t have any civil rights. The army is on the streets and they can just detain you and put you in jail without reason. If you have tattoos, they are putting you in jail for a year just to be investigated. The jails are full of gang members and they have zero tolerance to people from the LGBTQ+ community. If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

I’m nervous because it’s not just about me. I have friends, I have family, I have neighbors who are not rightfully here. I have so many gay friends who don’t have papers. They don’t even have a record and they can be deported anytime. It affects everybody.

I heard that Trump also has in mind to pass this law so that companies will be actually forced to just hire people with [legal] papers. I would say 80 percent of my friends are hardworking people, they are loving people, they have no record. Everybody in my community is scared.

It’s frustrating because most of the people, including myself, can’t vote. The people who are actually going to suffer cannot vote so we’re in everybody else’s hands.

Hopefully Trump winning is not going to happen. But we need to be ready for anything, right? I don’t even want to say it because it just breaks my heart knowing that that’s a possibility. I don’t think America can afford four more years of Trump’s era.

Claudia Garcia had never watched a televised presidential debate. On September 10, she tuned into ABC News’ showdown between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and was stunned to hear the Republican nominee repeat lies about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I was like, what?” Garcia recalls. “What is he saying? We are not that [as] people. We don’t eat dogs. We don’t eat cats.” 

An infrequent voter, Garcia will be going to the polls for only the third time in her life this November. Born in Riverside, California, but having spent most of her childhood in Mexico, she felt disconnected from politics. Her father told her voting did not make a difference. “If it’s not affecting me directly,” she thought, “it’s not affecting me.” But her husband, Salvador, a newly naturalized US citizen born in Mexico, felt otherwise. This year, he will be casting his first vote since pledging the Oath of Allegiance in February. Their two adult children will also be voting.

“Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

“I think a lot of these migrant and Hispanic homes,” Garcia says, “it’s not just they don’t want their kids to vote or they don’t want to vote themselves. I think we’re not informed…There’s a lot of education still to do in many of our communities.”

The Garcias live in Tulare in California’s Central Valley. Latinos account for 60 percent of eligible voters in the 22nd Congressional District. As my colleague Noah Lanard recently reported from the area, Democrats’ waning support in the region could determine the balance of power in Congress. In one of the closest House races of this election, Rudy Salas is facing a rematch against Republican incumbent Rep. David Valadao to become the first elected Latino congressman from the Central Valley. In 2022, Valadao, who is of Portuguese descent, beat Salas by three percentage points.

For Democrats to have a shot at picking up that seat, they need to not only hold on to Latino voters, but also hope for an end to—as one political strategist put it to NBC News—“anemically low” turnout. In the midterms, the 22nd Congressional District had the third lowest voter turnout of the House districts across the country. To do so, they could use the help of people like the Garcias: Latino voters who have not traditionally voted, or even first-time voters. In California and beyond, the path to controlling Congress and securing the White House may hinge on it. 

The main issues on their mind? The cost of living and immigration. “I was an immigrant myself,” Salvador, who gained legal status as a result of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the 1980s, says, “and I want more for the immigrant workers of this country.” He and his wife oppose Trump’s plans to mass deport millions of people from the United States and fear that more family separations are on the horizon if he returns to the Oval Office. 

They also hope comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Latinos at a recent Trump rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” can persuade voters to go for Democrats. “In his mind,” Garcia says of Trump, “we don’t matter. If you don’t look like him, then you’re you’re not worth it for him…Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

Immigration isn’t the single, or even the most, salient issue for Latino voters nationwide. But it intersects with broader concerns Latino communities have about the economy, jobs, and housing. In the battleground state of North Carolina, a pre-election poll by the civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS found that pocketbook issues rank as high priority for the state’s Latino voters. (Many also favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.) There are about 300,000 registered Latino voters in North Carolina.

Numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters.

The daughter of two Mexican immigrants, Irene Godinez started Poder NC Action in 2020 to foster civic participation among the growing US-born Latino youth population in the state. That year, the organization sent out thousands of political mailers featuring the face of iconic Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado as a strategy of tapping into culture to mobilize young people. In that election—which Trump carried by fewer than 75,o00 votes—first-time Latino voters comprised a large share of total voter turnout in North Carolina.

This year, Poder NC Action released a multi-part telenovela called “Alexia the Voter,” inspired by the Netflix show Jane the Virgin, to encourage young North Carolinians to vote. They have also hosted voter engagement events where people can learn about who’s on the ballot while getting their nails or hair done. “Our ultimate goal is to build independent political power,” Godinez, who served as Latino outreach director in North Carolina for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says, “But while we do that, we are building a political home for progressive Latinos in the state.”

Prior to Election Day, she says, numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters. “These are exactly the people that we’ve been targeting and activating because that’s where we see the opportunity to expand the electorate.”

Among the issues driving that electorate in the state are the economy, reproductive rights, and climate justice, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The young Latino voters Poder NC Action courts also tend to bring up the war in Gaza as a point of concern. (The organization didn’t endorse President Joe Biden, but released a “defensive endorsement” of Kamala Harris because her victory would block a right-wing opponent.)

“The thing I have been hearing from voters that we’ve been talking to is how they haven’t felt seen by the parties whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” Godinez says, “They don’t feel that either party is reaching out to them and trying to talk to them.” She believes the Democratic Party could have done more to appeal to Latinos in North Carolina, including sending bigger surrogate names to the state and crafting political mailers with original messages that weren’t just translated to Spanish from English.

“Even if we are 300,000 voters in the state right now,” Godinez adds, “we’re going to continue to increase at a faster pace than any other demographic because 50,000 Latinos will age into the electorate every single year. This could have been a really great year for them to lay the foundation of what it could look like to do Latino outreach in a very intentional way.”

In California, Garcia attributes her political awakening to her work, first as a canvasser and later as an organizer, with the group Poder Latinx to get people registered and out to vote. “I cannot be preaching and not doing,” she says. “I need to be a voice to those who don’t have one.”

She says she would like to see immigration reform that would benefit her neighbors and family members who “work out in the field, picking the food that we have on our table.” She also thinks of her nephews who are DACA recipients and whose lawful presence and ability to work and study in the country are in jeopardy. “It hits home,” Garcia says, adding: “Immigration is what motivates me and scares me, and that’s why I’m going to make sure that my ballot gets in the mail today.”

This election cycle, voters in some states will be presented with a confusing question when they cast their ballot: whether to make noncitizen voting—which is already illegal—illegal.

As many as eight states have a ballot measure to amend their constitution to make voting for citizens only: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. These amendments are intended to make it explicit that only Americans can vote in state and federal elections, even though it is already very much illegal for non-US citizens to vote (with the exception of a few jurisdictions that allow it in specific local races).

Former President Donald Trump and his allies, with the help of Elon Musk’s disinformation megaphone, have been promoting false claims of noncitizen voter fraud as part of a deep-pocketed preemptive effort to cast doubt on the electoral process and, if need be, challenge the results.

“I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November because I absolutely believe that that is how [Democrats] are planning to try to steal the election this year,” Cleta Mitchell, who is behind the Election Integrity Network’s highly organized machinations to contest a Trump defeat, told Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk earlier this year.

Without providing any evidence to support her claims, Mitchell said “illegals” are being registered to vote by nonprofits “that are shepherding these migrants all over the country, getting them IDs; getting them housing, paid phone cards, and food cards; and getting them on the voter rolls.” (As I’ve explained before, there is no evidence that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.)

Election experts have warned that these noncitizen voting ballot measures are not only unnecessary, but also risk disenfranchising voters who are naturalized citizens. A recent investigation by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and Votebeat identified at least 1o Americans in Texas who were mistakenly removed from voter rolls over suspicion that they were noncitizens.

Ballot measures to ban something that is already illegal can also serve as a stepping stone for the future introduction of stricter and burdensome voter registration requirements, such as asking for documentary proof of citizenship. Millions of Americans who lack a passport or birth certificate could be shut off from the electoral process as a result.

Noncitizen voting is essentially a myth. But here is where and how it will appear on the ballot in the 2024 election.

Idaho

Voting as a noncitizen in Idaho constitutes a misdemeanor. The question on voters’ ballot will look like this: “Shall Section 2, Article VI of the Constitution of the State of Idaho be amended to provide that individuals who are not citizens of the United States may not be qualified electors in any election held within the state of Idaho?” Idaho’s secretary of state, Phil McGrane, recently told the Idaho Capital Sun that his office identified—and was in the process of removing— 36 likely noncitizens on the registered voter rolls. “Out of the million-plus registered voters we started with,” he said, “we’re down to ten-thousandths of a percent in terms of this number.”

Iowa

The proposed amendment in Iowa would change language in the constitution to say “only a citizen” instead of “every citizen” is entitled to vote. In the meantime, state officials already have taken action to challenge the ballots of suspected noncitizens—a move that risks excluding eligible voters. Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, recently said his office identified 87 people who had reported not being a citizen to the state Department of Transportation and who voted in the last 12 years. The audit also reportedly found 67 registered noncitizens who didn’t cast a vote. Another 2,200 names have been flagged as potential noncitizen voters, though some may have naturalized since the time when they self-reported their status. The League of United Latin American Citizens and four naturalized citizens have since filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s program to purge suspected registered noncitizens from voter rolls, claiming the secretary of state’s list “failed to account for naturalization and is designed to facilitate the mass challenging of voters.”

Kentucky

One of two constitutional amendments on Kentucky’s ballot this election, Amendment 1 would add the following sentence to the constitution: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state.” Again, that is already the case. But proponents of the amendment, like Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, insist the original text stating that “every citizen” can vote isn’t the same as saying “only citizens” can vote. Adams has admitted that he hasn’t seen any evidence of noncitizens attempting to cast a vote in elections.

Missouri

The first checkbox on Missouri’s voter registration document requires applicants to certify they’re citizens of the United States. Still, voters in the November election will see Amendment 7, a ballot measure to ban noncitizen voting (by changing “all citizens” to “only citizens” in the constitution) and simultaneously prohibit ranked-choice voting. Two residents filed a lawsuit challenging the language of the ballot measure as “unfair and inaccurate” for leading voters to think noncitizen voting isn’t already illegal in Missouri. But in August, a judge upheld the ballot language. Critics of the provision have called it “ballot candy” to trick voters into approving a ban on ranked-choice voting.

North Carolina

In June, the North Carolina General Assembly, in which Republicans have a supermajority, passed a bill to amend the language of the constitution to read that “only a citizen of the United States with the listed qualifications is entitled to vote in an election.” (Currently, it states that “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” has the right to do so.) Between 2015 and 2022, the North Carolina State Board of Elections documented only eight referred cases of noncitizens registering to vote or voting. The “wording of this amendment, which strips out specific language acknowledging that citizens may be born or naturalized, may confuse naturalized citizens and discourage them from exercising their fundamental right to vote,” the ACLU of North Carolina wrote in September.

Oklahoma

Voters in Oklahoma will see on their ballot State Question 834, an amendment to make it clear “that only citizens of the United States are qualified to vote in this state.” In May, the Republican-controlled legislature passed, along party lines, a resolution to place the amendment on the ballot. If approved, it would have the effect of changing a single word in the state constitution’s text: to say “only”—in place of “all”—US citizens may vote in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma State Election Board’s website states that registering to vote in the state as a noncitizen constitutes a felony.

South Carolina

Similar to Oklahoma’s, the ballot measure in South Carolina would amend the state constitution to say that “only a citizen,” instead of “every citizen,” is entitled to vote. But the way the measure appears on the ballot makes it unclear that the constitution already limits voting to citizens. It asks voters: “Must Section 4, Article II of the Constitution of this State, relating to voter qualifications, be amended so as to provide that only a citizen of the United States and of this State of the age of 18 and upwards who is properly registered is entitled to vote as provided by law?” You can’t blame voters for thinking the answer to that question should be yes.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin already requires voters to be US citizens, and when registering to vote, people need to check a box confirming they are citizens. Since 2019, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has identified only three cases of noncitizens being referred for prosecution for casting a vote unlawfully. In most instances, people were mistaken about their eligibility to vote. According to the ACLU of Wisconsin, no jurisdictions in the state currently allow noncitizen voting. But supporters of the proposed amendment—which would change the constitutional text from “every” to “only a” US citizen “may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum”—say it’s necessary because other states have allowed it.

On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act. (Over his four years in office, Trump went on to implement 472 executive actions in an effort to reshape the immigration system.)

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before.”

But for many observers, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” would go down as the most memorable and infamous: the “Muslim ban.”

Touted as an anti-terrorism measure, the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban on foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—was a watershed moment. It had a particularly harsh toll on Syrian refugees, indefinitely suspending their resettlement (which was considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” despite America’s role in the conflict). But, more so, it showed the extent to which the new administration would make its nativist agenda real.

The morning after Trump signed the proclamation, thousands of protesters rushed to airports across the country as word got out that travelers were being stopped and detained. House and Senate Democrats gathered outside the Supreme Court in opposition to the ban. International condemnation followed, with global leaders denouncing Trump’s actions as shameful and divisive. Former President Barack Obama praised in a statement “citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials.”

Back then, the anger and outrage that this could not be normal or, indeed, American, felt palpable and spurred fierce resistance among a cohort unmoored by the Trump administration. But years of anti-immigrant policymaking and rhetoric—especially a flip by Democrats away from condemnation of Trump to tough border talk to win back centrist voters—have changed the landscape. There is now a normalization of the idea that America should restrict immigration.

Facing the prospect of a second Trump administration—and, with it, an escalation in hostility against immigrants and organizers—immigrant rights activists, advocates, and lawyers are building their defenses back up.

In a time of apparent collective amnesia about Trump’s actions, many of the activists have not forgotten what they had to stand up against. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy organization representing more than 200 groups across the state, helped lead a nationwide pushback against the travel ban. “As a Muslim American,” he later recalled in a USA Today op-ed, “it was impossible not to feel directly and personally targeted.”

Now, Awawdeh, and countless other veteran immigrant rights organizers who were at the forefront of the firewall to mitigate the harm of the Trump White House’s attacks on immigrants are gearing up for another battle. Only this time around, they have the benefit of knowing what to expect—and something of a blueprint for how to respond.

“In the scenario where Trump is elected,” Awawdeh tells me, “we go into defend and protect mode. We’ve seen what he’s done to our communities in his first term…He had no regard for the law and he continued to run afoul of the laws on the books, even our own constitution. That didn’t stop him.”

They have their work cut out for them. The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; deploying the military within US borders (against migrants and, presumably, protesters); ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants; and possibly reviving the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation.

If reelected, Trump has also vowed to restore the “Muslim ban” executive order. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he said in 2023. “Remember the famous travel ban?” Trump reportedly said in September about stopping refugees from Gaza from being allowed into the United States. “We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” He added: “We’re not taking them from [terror] infested countries.”

Trump has made expelling the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants from the United States the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. In interviews and rallies, he has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history, a sweeping effort that would involve gulag-like detention camps on the border and likely the use of the military within US territory—on top of the human cost to immigrants and their families and economic devastation.

“Even if he is unsuccessful in moving mass deportation forward,” Awawdeh says, “What he will do is instill a deeply chilling fear within our communities.”

Awawdeh hopes to take lessons from those first four years of resisting not only the travel ban, but also family separation and a rule punishing immigrants for accessing public benefits. “The biggest piece that we did but didn’t do as strongly in his first go-around was litigation,” Awawdeh says, “and I think that’s the piece that we’re all going to be doubling and tripling down on.”

Policy and legal experts at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) are actively keeping a growing list of policy proposals from the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook and drafting legal memos for potential lawsuits. “Part of the analysis is really asking: What are the things that we know are patently unconstitutional?” says Kica Matos, president of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund. That list includes the promise to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants and the plan to deploy the US military to conduct arrests and deportations in the interior of the country.

“The threats to carry this in a bloody way are indicative to us of intentionality to willfully disregard the constitutional rights that we all have and to violate the civil rights of people who might be impacted,” Matos adds.

During “Trump 1.0,” as she puts it, the federal courts served as a bulwark against some of the former president’s most extreme policies. But the Supreme Court has only gotten more conservative and willing to see the limits of presidential power extended, including to dictate immigration policy. In this environment, fighting back will require a collective effort, from inside the courthouses all the way out to the streets.

“We are bracing for the worst, and we have to think ahead because the stakes are too high to wait,” Awawdeh says. “Think of the worst case scenario in your mind of what a white supremacist would do in office with Project 2025 as their manifesto. That’s the way we’re planning right now.”

Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness. Across the country, advocates are expanding know-your-rights trainings and campaigns about interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They’re also distributing family safety plans to immigrant households and coordinating with local communities to establish safe spaces—including offices doubling as rapid response hubs—where immigrants can seek shelter during raids or roundups, and setting up emergency funds.

In scenario-planning meetings with partner organizations, Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), says they have been asking themselves: Can we look at the past post-election periods and what can we learn from how we all responded as an immigrant rights movement?

ImmDef is a 200-people legal services organization based in Los Angeles that specializes in deportation defense work. (The city has one of the largest number of immigrants with pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts in the country—113,292, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.) In 2023, the nonprofit represented about 2,500 immigrants in removal proceedings and assisted many more with other legal issues, including newly arriving asylum seekers.

“Every time somebody goes into a courtroom,” Toczylowski says, “their potential exile from their communities, their permanent separation from their families, and oftentimes their life itself is on the line.” For clients facing persecution or violence in their countries of origin, she puts in no uncertain terms, “we’re talking about death penalty cases in immigration court.”

The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration

What keeps Toczylowski up at night these days, having seen parents in her own neighborhood get picked up by ICE after dropping off their children at school, is the thought of cases where a lawyer couldn’t intervene in time to stop a deportation. As the November election nears, she wonders what a mass deportation operation will do. “We see what gets left behind when someone is ripped out of our community,” she says.

If sweeping raids and mass deportation come to pass, boosting the legal defense infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize a network of pro-bono immigration attorneys will be critical. ImmDef has long been investing in building deportation defense capacity. For one, they have been recruiting and training lawyers who are interested in doing that work but lack the legal expertise, cultural competency, or language skills, and have brought on more attorneys to join the strategic litigation and advocacy teams.

Over the last couple of years, the group has tripled their team in San Diego to help prospective asylum seekers with their initial screening credible fear interviews and launched a welcoming project to inform immigrants facing deportation orders about their rights. To that end, they have partnered with Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an organization serving indigenous migrants, to create and disseminate educational videos in languages other than English and Spanish.

Toczylowski acknowledges a “whole of immigrant rights movement response” will be necessary, but she believes they’re ready. “We’ve survived things once before and we will survive this time around,” she says, “because there’s no other choice. Our communities need us to be there.”

If implemented, the Project 2025 agenda could undermine deportation defense services and further strain critical and already scarce legal aid for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors. Among other things, the project’s playbook chapter on DHS pushes for restricting access to federal funds to organizations unless they “support the broader homeland security mission.” Advocates also fear the conservative plot could lead to pressure on local and state jurisdictions to defund legal services, make immigration courts more hostile to immigrants, and even open up legal providers to criminal penalties.

“There’s no question that Project 2025 would shift the landscape enormously,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s advancing universal representation initiative, says, “and require some real recalibration.” In 2017, in response to an environment of heightened immigration enforcement, the organization established a network of governments, service providers, and advocates to implement publicly funded deportation defense programs at the state and local governments, for immigrants who, unlike their counterparts in the criminal justice system, aren’t entitled to free legal representation.

“If we do enter a period of really intense immigration enforcement again,” Kessler says, “those legal teams will be poised to continue that defense.”

In our conversations, Kessler and others stressed that the fight for immigrants’ rights doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Nor is it contingent on the outcome of the election. If elected, Vice President Kamala Harris might continue the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum at the southern border. And the immigration system will not cease to be broken. While preparedness is key, so is mobilizing the American public to resist the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants. That will require large scale mobilizations, not unlike the resistance to the travel ban, to draw visibility and push for intervention from elected officials.

“Grave injustices preceded the former administration,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas legal services nonprofit founded in 1986. “And for all intents and purposes will continue into a next administration, no matter who is elected into office.”

This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This was partially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.

On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy. https://t.co/If9G1sNEzj pic.twitter.com/TIWhi25Vdu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 28, 2024

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:

When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. 

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.

When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.

A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.

It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.

The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)

The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice. 

But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.

Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.

Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”

All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”

Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3

— Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

Twelve years ago, when former President Barack Obama proudly created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to shield undocumented youth from the threat of deportation, all involved thought of it as a temporary fix. It would be, as Obama said, a “stopgap measure.” Eventually, everyone assumed Congress would get together and pass legislation for the so-called Dreamers brought to the country as children.

But, as I’ve written about before—despite the seeming bipartisan consensus of the time and DACA’s outsized weight on the lives of the 800,000 undocumented young people who have benefited from it and built their lives in the United States—the long-envisioned legislative agreement that would have afforded DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship never came to be.

Now, the prospects of a bill to help Dreamers seem grim. Both presidential candidates are more focused on talking up border security. And this year, when Democrats supported a proposed bipartisan immigration bill, they all but ignored the predicament of the undocumented youth as part of the discussion.

With Dreamers off the agenda, DACA has lived far past its intended transitionary period. That means recipients are stuck in legal limbo and at the mercy of presidential transitions and the whims of the judiciary.

Now, the fate of hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth sits in the hands of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguably the most conservative jurisdiction in the nation where Trump-appointed judges are pushing the MAGA agenda to reshape the United States one radical ruling at a time.

“Living as a DACA recipient, not a day passes that I do not think about how my life could be so different if I had a permanent sense of security in my country, the only country I know,” Jose Barrera with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) said in a statement ahead of this week’s hearing. “Others who, like me, are DACA recipients try to live their lives the best they can every day, but you can’t help but feel forgotten when year after year, Congress and our elected leaders fail to resolve this issue. Our lives cannot be kept on hold forever.”

On Thursday morning, a panel of three federal judges—none of whom are Trump appointees—heard oral arguments in Texas v. United States. The case was brought by Republican-led states in 2018 challenging the legality of DACA. Outside the courthouse, DACA recipients and supporters chanted, “Home is here.”

In 2021, Texas District Court Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that Obama exceeded the executive branch’s authority in creating DACA and that the memorandum violated the rulemaking process. In so doing, Hanen blocked the processing of new applications nationwide.

After the Biden administration appealed and issued a final rule to codify DACA into federal regulation, the Fifth Circuit sided with the states and upheld the district court’s decision. The judges—one Bush and two Trump appointees—rejected the government’s argument that DACA is an appropriate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The case then went back to the lower court, where in 2023 Hanen declared DACA unlawful. “While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families,” he wrote, “this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time.”

Twelve years after DACA’s signing, and after years of legal wrangling, the program is in a perilous place. At Thursday’s hearing in New Orleans, there were a slew of specific questions before the judges: whether the Biden administration acted within its authority when it attempted to strengthen and safeguard DACA in 2022; if the lower court’s ruling halting new applications nationally was excessive; and whether the state of Texas, a plaintiff, successfully showed evidence of harm as a result of costs associated with social services provided to DACA recipients.

The Texas v. United States case could drag for weeks or months and eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. But what happens to DACA will also hinge on the outcome of the November presidential election. While in office, Donald Trump tried to rescind the program. The Supreme Court ruled the move was “arbitrary and capricious.” (It did not address the underlying issue of DACA’s validity.)  If Trump takes back the White House, Cecilia Muñoz, who served as director of the Domestic Policy Council under Obama and helped establish DACA, told me, “You can expect DACA to shrink or disappear entirely.”

On the other side, Vice President Kamala Harris, throughout her career, has voiced strong support for DACA. As she sought the Democratic nomination in 2019, Harris put forward a comprehensive plan to provide a pathway to citizenship to more than 2 million Dreamers through executive action. The roadmap, which mirrors ongoing demands from immigrant rights groups, included measures to expand DACA eligibility and the use of the so-called “parole in place” power to remove barriers preventing Dreamers with American espouses from qualifying for a green card.

“Dreamers cannot afford to sit around and wait for Congress to get its act together,” Harris said at the time. “These young people are just as American as I am, and they deserve a president who will fight for them from day one.”

It remains to be seen if she’ll honor that pledge as the 2024 Democratic nominee. So far, Harris’ commitments have been somewhat more modest. In June, on the occasion of the program’s anniversary, she vowed to “continue fighting to protect Dreamers,” but placed the responsibility of addressing the issue of a pathway to citizenship on Congress. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in August.

At the hearing, the US government lawyer Brian Boynton and counselors for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the state of New Jersey defending DACA, disputed Texas’ legal standing to sue, arguing the harm the state claims to experience from health care and education costs—as well as their assertion that in the absence of the program, recipients without legal status would choose to leave the state or the country—is too indirect and speculative. (One of the judges seemed to agree, pressing the lawyer for Texas to provide concrete evidence to back up the assumption that DACA recipients would likely “self-exile.”) They also asked the court to consider the impact of the program on thousands of US citizen children whose parents have DACA, as well as on businesses across the dozens of states that benefit from it.

One of the judges also challenged Texas on the issue of whether states can rely on lower courts to “usurp” federal immigration policy. He cited a “sea change” decision by the Supreme Court last year reaffirming the executive branch’s authority to govern on immigration. Towards the end of his arguments, the Texas counsel acknowledged that they’re asking for DACA to be wound down across the country. The lawyer representing the Biden administration petitioned the court to at minimum continue to preserve DACA for the more than 500,000 current recipients.

“This case should not even be in court in the first place. DACA recipients only bring benefits to the states in which they live,” Nina Perales, the attorney arguing for MALDEF, said at a press conference afterwards. “Consistently since the very beginning of this case Texas has never been able to point to any DACA recipient that caused any harm to the state of Texas and Texas was the only state that tried.”

It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”

As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.

During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)

“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. 

They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.

It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”

As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.

During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)

“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. 

They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.

In the waning days of the Trump presidency, Russell Vought, the outgoing director of the Office of Management and Budget, had a request.

After years in Washington, DC, soaking in the minutiae of policy, Vought had come to both know and loathe the bureaucracy. A rare voice in an administration committed to “draining the swamp” who had actual Beltway experience, he found in the Trump era he could put his expertise to use.

On November 20, 2020, Vought wrote to the head of the Office of Personnel Management for approval to reclassify dozens of career civil servant jobs within his agency. A few weeks before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of at-will employees—so-called Schedule F positions—which would be exempt from the rules designed to protect civil servants from partisan hatchetmen.

Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of OMB roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a technical adjustment. But in practice, reassignment would have stripped 415 employees—68 percent of the agency’s personnel—of work protections, effectively making it easier for political appointees to fire them. Vought called it “another step to make Washington accountable to the American people.”

In the end, Vought couldn’t get it done by inauguration. But this combination of lofty public rhetoric and ruthless behind-the-scenes gamesmanship has become his trademark. By the tail end of Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the OMB director had turned into one of the president’s most trusted and obsequious officials—an acolyte with a knack for making the half-formed schemes from his boss achievable.

As Trump runs for a second term, Vought’s years of faithful service haven’t gone unnoticed; his name has been widely floated for chief of staff, and he is a key policy adviser. One of the masterminds behind Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition blueprint to overhaul the executive branch and usher in an ultraconservative agenda—Vought, an avowed Christian nationalist, is the man best positioned to realize Trump’s visions.

A wonk with a neatly trimmed beard and tortoiseshell glasses, Vought, 48, looks like a generic bureaucrat. He has referred to himself as the “boring budget guy” and to his coterie of paper pushers as a group of “propeller heads.” He can be self-effacing, claiming that if he can get the job done, anyone can. But this modesty belies his strategic ability to bend the mechanics of government to the president’s will.

“What makes Vought especially dangerous is he combines ideological extremism with a familiarity and comfort with Washington’s political processes,” says Katherine Stewart, author of the forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. “He knows how to undermine agencies, how to create new bureaucratic forces, how to block funding, and how to engage with other practical features of our political system.”

For the 920-page Mandate for Leadership policy playbook from Project 2025, Vought wrote a chapter that exults in the “enormous power” of the president and previews how a conservative administration would radically subjugate the federal government. He has also crafted a 180-day battle plan to arm an incoming president with hundreds of ready-to-go executive orders, regulations, and secretarial memos. Although the details remain secret, he has hinted at pre-plotted ways to enact Trump’s mass deportations, reclaim federal agencies’ independence, and deploy the US military domestically to police migrants (and, conceivably, quash protests).

“[Trump] has never had an army of people that could serve in government, believe fully in what he believes in, and can execute it with enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” Vought said in June on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, where he is a frequent guest. “We will give this next term [the potential for] something that the country has never seen before.”

Every president makes a mark on the civil service with the political appointees they select to lead government agencies. But Vought nurtures a far more expansive—and alarming—ambition: to institute a new governing paradigm predicated on unrestrained presidential authority. With Vought as the architect, Trump could take his “dictator” on “day one” aspirations beyond words, prosecuting political opponents while avoiding accountability for his own crimes.

In a second term, Trump—and Vought—would complete unfinished business, like the OMB shake-up. Trump left office before the agency could implement Schedule F, and the Biden administration rescinded the executive order. Former staff and experts warned it would have undermined institutional knowledge in favor of blind allegiance. Stuart Shapiro, who worked at OMB from 1998 to 2003 and is the author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence, still describes this first attempt to upend the agency as “a significantly traumatic event.”

Vought and the rest of the Project 2025 administration-in-waiting plan to revive Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potentially, 50,000 federal workers could be affected, their expert roles open to partisan MAGA loyalists ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

For Vought, politics is downstream from religion. He sees a strong presidency as a way to bring forth a Christian nation. Vought opposes abortion and has referred to transgender identity as a “contagion.” He has suggested migration policy should be rooted in Judeo-Christian principles, with immigrants tested on their readiness to “assimilate.” If Trump wins, Vought wants to infuse the next conservative administration with the values of Christian nationalism—the conviction that the United States is bound to the teachings of Christ, from which all else follows.

“Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Since leaving government, Vought has worked from the outside toward this goal. He founded the Center for Renewing America, part of the “nerve center” of MAGA groups laying the groundwork for Trump’s return. With the stated mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God,” CRA is a player in a coalition advising Project 2025.

As much as Trump has tried to distance himself from the initiative in recent months, Vought’s prominent role in it—and his clear ties to the campaign—tell a different story. In May, the Republican National Committee picked Vought to be the policy director of their official 2024 platform. In a secretly recorded interview, Vought—thinking he was talking to prospective donors—told the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting that Trump’s public disapproval of Project 2025 amounted to “graduate-level politics.” He also left no room for doubt as to his motivation for helping Trump get back to the White House: “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state.”

“Vought is maybe the most centrally connected hub in the wheel of what a second Trump administration would look like,” says Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan who has been closely following Vought’s moves. In return for their service, Moynihan says, Vought and others in Trump’s orbit see him as “a destabilizing force that would allow them to fundamentally change much of America as a society—starting with American government.”

The youngest of seven children, Vought grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut. His father was an electrician and his mother a schoolteacher whom he credits with leading him “to the Lord” at the age of four. Vought attended Christian summer camps and later studied at Wheaton College, a private Christian school in Illinois. “Ever since college,” Vought said on the Founders Ministries’ podcast in January 2023, “I’ve been pouring into political theory, policy.”

In his senior year, Vought discovered German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler and died in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. Vought pored over Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers, borrowing from his thoughts on personal responsibility as an act of freedom in response to God’s call. Vought began to view politics as a necessary instrument of Christian morality. God did not want his followers to just melt into “armchair criticism” of the world, Vought said he learned from reading Bonhoeffer; instead, one should be “sitting and engaging and making mistakes [while] being willing to accomplish all that you can because that moment has been given to you by God.”

After graduating in 1998, Vought went to work on Capitol Hill. As a fiscal hawk staffer for GOP Sens. Dan Coats of Indiana and Phil Gramm from Texas, he immersed himself in legislative procedure and federal budget policy. Vought describes working for Gramm—an unbending free-market advocate known for his antagonistic style—as a “seminal experience.” Gramm, like Vought, took joy in combining technocratic arcana with conservative fundamentalism.

While serving as policy director for Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Vought assisted in forging a federal budget overhaul bill lauded by conservatives as the “gold standard” for such a proposal. It called for slashing entitlement programs—including veteran and retirement benefits—by $1.8 trillion. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted at the time the cuts would have represented the most severe in modern US history. Vought, Hensarling said, showed “unwavering devotion to the conservative principles.”

In 2004, Vought got a JD from George Washington University as a prelude to a steady rise through leadership positions. He worked in the House Republican Study Committee, the bulwark of right-wing strategy in Congress, then chaired by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. For the caucus, Vought helped craft Operation Offset, a deficit-reduction plan proposal for Hurricane Katrina relief that would have cut billions of dollars in assistance programs for low-income families, including Medicaid. He defined the job as being the “aide-de-camp in [Congress members’] legislative skirmishes.”

Still, by 2010, Vought had grown frustrated. There was an unwillingness, he believed, among Republican establishment figures to really embrace ideological fights. He transitioned from apparatchik to rebel, joining Heritage Action for America, the foundation’s lobbying arm.

Operating from what the group called a “frat house” in Washington, Vought kept tabs and scorecards on Republicans in Congress based on their conservatism. He helped build a program to train conservative activists and campaigned to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee supported the arms reduction treaty with Russia, Vought angrily led a public charge against him as a RINO. Vought ranted about the cost of food stamp programs and opposed a Republican-sponsored highway bill, saying, “Long-term success of transformational conservative reforms is won and lost in trenches such as these.”

This time outside the government allowed him to speak honestly. Vought, it became clear, saw compromise as a sign of betrayal, fiscal clashes as power struggles, and conflict as opportunity for change. “We need elected officials free of calcified political assumptions of what is possible that reveal only their own level of accommodation with the liberal welfare state,” he wrote on the right-wing website RedState. “And we need officials with the courage to actually shape public opinion with urgency in favor of the policies that are necessary to bring the nation back from the brink.”

Vought quickly earned a reputation as a political brawler. A former Heritage colleague described him to the Washington Post as “ideological in the extreme.” (Vought and CRA did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

For some, his unflinching religious zeal might have proved disqualifying. But it was an asset to his former boss, Pence, an evangelical Christian who was now headed to the White House as Trump’s vice president. In the spring of 2017, with Pence’s endorsement, Trump tapped Vought to be deputy director of OMB, the epicenter of policy influence in the executive branch.

At Vought’s Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) grilled him over a 2016 blog post in which he defended his alma mater’s decision to put a professor on administrative leave for stating that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” Vought had written, they “stand condemned” for rejecting Jesus Christ. Vought—confirmed with a tiebreaking vote from Pence—later called that confrontation with the Vermont senator a “warning shot to Christians across the country.” After almost a year as the confirmed second-in-command at OMB, Vought became acting director in 2019 just after Trump chose then-Director Mick Mulvaney to be his chief of staff.

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

“They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go.”

This was a somewhat radical departure from the norm of OMB. Part of the Executive Office of the President, the agency’s 500 or so career civil servants pride themselves on acting as impartial advisers on policy, budget development and execution, and federal regulations. The work requires a tough balancing act between carrying out the administration’s vision and mitigating the risk of bad decisions. Under Vought, the agency’s culture of serving the presidency—not one particular president—was put to the test. “Vought was seen as valuing political support far more than the competence,” Shapiro writes in his book. OMB employees Shapiro interviewed describe leadership willing to push the boundaries of legality and ignore precedent with “budget gimmicks.”

“A lot of what [Trump] wanted to do and how…was contrary to all the traditions, past practices, and sometimes the law,” Sally Katzen, who served at OMB during the Clinton administration, says. “Trump’s political appointees didn’t want to hear [that] from [civil servants]. It’s like in so many different agencies when Trump was president: The people who knew anything were shut out of the process.” Katzen says Trump’s people “didn’t like hearing ‘no, you can’t; no, you shouldn’t.’”

Vought has made this frustration public. He criticized recalcitrant political appointees as “unwilling to think creatively” and harbored special contempt for career civil servants who worried about violating the law. “The nature of the bureaucracy is that if it isn’t status quo, it must be impossible,” Vought said in 2019. “However, most of the time, when we actually dig into the ways to do what the president wants, we find a way to accomplish it.” He views his legacy at OMB as reining in the broken bureaucracy and “pioneering the type of government that is necessary for an America-first, populist administration.”

Such willingness led Trump to ask Vought for help at key junctures. When rolling out an anti–critical race theory executive order barring anti-racism trainings for federal workers, Trump went to Vought, who dismissed internal resistance as activism to be beaten down. Vought was also behind Trump’s national emergency declaration to unlock billions of dollars in funds from the Pentagon to build the border wall without congressional approval; the office did so despite objection from White House counsels, whom Vought called his number-one adversary in the administration. (An appeals court later ruled the move illegal.)

“He very much knows how to use the executive office to push their policies,” says former Trump White House aide Olivia Troye, who describes Vought as one of Trump’s main enablers. “I think he’s also learned a lot of lessons from the first time around of how to go about doing things.”

These edge-of-the-envelope workarounds (or, as Vought put it, “innovative ways”) put OMB at the center of Trump’s first impeachment over the freezing of congressionally appropriated security assistance to Ukraine as part of a reelection bid to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the Biden family. Vought helped provide a legal rationale for the hold, ignoring concerns from national security and Department of Defense officials and, ultimately, in violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) limiting the president’s authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. When subpoenaed to testify in the House impeachment inquiry, Vought declined and called it a “sham process.”

Now, Vought and his colleagues at CRA have been making a case for a future Trump administration to exert even more control over the federal budget. They claim the ICA, which Vought has characterized as “an albatross around a president’s neck,” is unconstitutional and should be overturned. In a second term, Trump has vowed to challenge the 50-year-old law and “squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy.” By overriding spending decisions enacted by Congress, Trump would be more empowered to terminate agency programs he disagrees with.

“We are in an era where presidents already are too powerful,” Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, wrote of Trump’s plan to seize control of impoundment power. “They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go,” he tells me, adding, “They want a president to be like a king.”

Vought launched CRA in 2021, with Trump’s blessings and fundraising support, as a government-in-exile. The venture included other former Trump officials like ex–Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and Jeffrey Clark, the Department of Justice attorney involved in the plot to subvert the 2020 election. (At a CRA event this year, Bannon praised Cuccinelli and others in the organization as “madmen.”) A sister entity of the deep-pocketed Conservative Partnership Institute, CRA boasted of raising $4.75 million from undisclosed donors last year.

Vought sees himself and CRA as the tip of the spear in a counterrevolution against the left. Everything from the FBI to the Department of Education has been gripped by a “post-constitutional order” imposed by “a corrupt Marxist vanguard.” In this view, wokeism has ruined America, and it’s incumbent on them to correct course. That means going even more on the offensive on cultural battles—pushing anti-CRT model legislation for school districts in several states and urging Republican governors to circumvent federal immigration law by declaring an “invasion” at the southern border.

It also requires wielding budgetary austerity to defund and bring to heel agencies conservatives believe have gone rogue. “I love to cut spending wherever it is,” Vought told the New Yorker, “and I like to cut spending the most in the bureaucracy.” What excited him most, he said, was “cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education.”

As the budget guru for House Republicans, Vought recently played a pivotal role in the debt ceiling showdown, displaying his acumen for budget-cutting power plays. Throughout the crisis, Vought pushed the insurgent Freedom Caucus to stand their ground and extract concessions for the conservative cause. Career disrupters like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had in Vought a key ally. He “understands strategy and leverage as well as anyone in Washington, DC,” Gaetz said with delight. The battle culminated in the ousting of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

At CRA, Vought has merged the culture battle of the new right with the old right’s love of small government. It was Vought who planted the original idea for what would become the House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. And it was Vought’s organization that put forward a 2023 budget model outlining $9 trillion in spending cuts that reads like a list of grievances, from supposed “neo-racism and gender theory” programs to “climate extremism” policies. “America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought wrote in his budget’s introduction. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country.”

The document also offers a look into how Vought and his allies hope to manipulate federal agencies. When it comes to the FBI, the group would take away resources from counterintelligence and other areas “not salvageable due to a willful and repeated pattern of partisan lawfare waged against Americans.” At the same time, the budget proposed channeling more funding to the criminal investigative division to “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels.”

In papers and legal memos, Vought and his associates have articulated a vast array of dubious maneuvers to remake American democracy, from ending the Department of Justice’s independence from the president to allowing federal troops to act as domestic law enforcement. Their plans to remove checks and balances and challenge long-established constraints on executive overreach, if realized, would unleash a Trump presidency battle-tested to turn gripe into policy.

If Trump returns to the White House, says Stewart, the author of Money, Lies, and God, “Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: He would “stop all migrant flights,” do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.

But one part of the GOP nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:

Trump here uses the phrase "remigration." I was unfamiliar with the term, so I googled it.

Wikipedia describes it as a "far-right and Identitarian political concept" largely used to describe the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants from Europe. https://t.co/i8K5yK0sPk pic.twitter.com/vECWjE1DVK

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) September 15, 2024

“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant language in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.

“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”

The value-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.

In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.

Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”

“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.

Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)

More recently, according to local reports, an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan “Rapid remigration creates living space,” a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.

Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.

According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”

As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The use of this kind of language fits the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)

If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.

But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”

During the ABC News presidential debate on Tuesday night, Donald Trump invoked over and over the issue he believes will win him the November election: immigration.

That meant a deluge of disparaging comments about migrants. He falsely claimed they are “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”; he said immigrants coming in are “at the highest level of criminality.” Trump couldn’t even stop himself from repeating the unspeakably racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating domestic pets. (The final of these led to a bizarre interaction: The moderators fact-checking the former president’s claims of animal eating as Trump interrupted to say “people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.”)

But, when it came to the framing of immigration, Trump did ultimately have the last word on the debate stage—both literally and figuratively. Just before the head-to-head came to a close, the former president used his final remarks to define the issue on his own perverse terms: “What these people have done to our country, and maybe toughest of all, is allowing millions of people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country,” he said.

The entire debate about immigration, to the extent it even happened, existed within Trump’s harmful idea. The only political points made on immigration on stage were about enforcement.

Vice President Harris hinted at an agenda focused on border enforcement and reviving a now-defunct sweeping bipartisan Senate immigration bill that would have added 1,500 border patrol agents to the force and raised the standards for asylum claims. That proposed legislation, which the Biden administration described as the “toughest” border enforcement measure in decades, has somehow become synonymous with compromise on immigration, despite doing little to advance Democrats’ long-standing promises of legalization for undocumented populations. (Trump torpedoed the bill to avoid handing Democrats a victory on a seemingly intractable issue.)

Trump’s misleading generalizations about “migrant crime,” went largely unchallenged—both by Harris and the media. At times, they were even reinforced. In reactions to JD Vance’s post-debate defense of Trump’s Springfield lies, CNN commentators eagerly pushed back on criticism that the media hasn’t been covering isolated incidents of migrants perpetrating violence. “There have been all kinds of stories and all kinds of coverage of immigrant crime and every state is a border state,” Chris Wallace said. (He did not note that data shows immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.)

On stage, Trump didn’t have to account for how he would carry out his potentially catastrophic and inhumane plans to mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. He just ranted about “millions of criminals” and “terrorists” entering the country to vote for Democrats. Nor did Trump answer why he killed a bipartisan deal that would have delivered on Republicans’ wishlist of border restriction measures without providing a path to legalization for the undocumented. Instead, he evaded the question by disputing Harris’ dismissal of his rallies’ crowd before shifting to pet-eating-migrants.

It should go without saying that the contrast between Harris and Trump on all things, including if not especially immigration, is as clear as day. For one, she’s not proposing building sprawling detention camps to hold thousands of immigrants or vowing to use the military to police the border. But when given the opportunity to further stress that distinction to her advantage, Harris didn’t take it. She didn’t call out Trump’s mass deportation plot or challenge his repeated assertions that migrants commit crimes and represent an existential threat to the United States.

When asked about the Biden administration border policies, Harris—who has a proven track record of advocating for immigrants—instead defaulted to putting on her prosecutorial hat and linked immigration to criminality by touting her experience tackling “transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.” To attack Trump for tanking the bipartisan border deal, Harris said, “he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Given the current state of the immigration debate, that may as well be the safer strategy when it comes to such a polarizing issue. But advocates and immigrant rights groups have long disputed the notion that immigration is inherently a liability for the Biden administration—and by proxy Harris—urging them to adopt an unapologetically pro-immigrant stance and go on the offensive against Republicans’ xenophobic agenda.

Ahead of the debate, I spoke with Michelle Ming, political director at the immigrant-youth led United We Dream network. On Monday, the organization’s political and electoral arm endorsed Harris, saying in a statement the goal is to block another Trump presidency and prevent mass deportations. “We know the fear that our communities lived with under his presidency, and just the uncertainty of making it through another day in this country without being rounded up, deported or arrested,” Ming said. “We feel deep in our bodies this understanding that we can’t go back to that, our communities can’t survive another four years of that.”

Still, that doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly approve of Harris. “I think what Kamala Harris needs to do is get up there and really make herself stand apart from Trump, rather than trying to be more Republican than Trump on immigration, which is, frankly, something that it feels like she’s trying to do right now, or that the Democrats are telling her to do,” she added. “That’s not a winning strategy.”