AUSTIN, Texas — Throughout his travels around the country on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump frequently vowed to implement policies to significantly shake up immigration reform, including mass deportation and ending birthright citizenship.
Now as he prepares to take office as the next President of the United States, there are many questions as to how he will carry out his plans for immigration policy.
"We're getting them out of our country," Trump said during a recent campaign speech. "They came in illegally. They're destroying our country. We're getting them out."
Joshua Treviño, the Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation- a conservative think tank in Austin, said it is a big job but needs to be done.
"My expectation is that they're going to think of a way, and probably already have thought of a way, to do it rationally, effectively and also humanely," Treviño said. "It's going to be a large one, but it's also a necessary one, and given its necessity, it's not one that we should shy away from."
The idea of mass deportations brings several logistical challenges, such as the logistics of identifying and locating immigrants, as well as the process of detaining them and holding them prior to being deported.
"I think that is almost an insurmountable task because of the number of individuals here who may fall under that," Edna Yang, Co-Director of American Gateways, which provides immigration legal services, said. "Many of those individuals have long-term ties here in the U.S. and may have forms of relief available to them. They are our community members. They have families here."
Five million immigrants live in Texas, which accounts for roughly 11% of immigrants in the United States. The state is also home to an estimated 1.6 million undocumented immigrants.
Yang said heavy enforcement won't solve the problems in the immigration system, such as backlogs of individuals with removal orders or waiting for immigration hearings.
"We don't want open borders, and we don't want chaos, but we want something humane. We want something that reflects our national values," Yang said. "If we only focus on deportation, on closing the border, it's going to lead to separating families. It's going to exacerbate problems. It will lead to additional wait times, and I think it will make the situation much worse than it is now."
Trump has also vowed to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States whose parents are illegal immigrants, resume construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border- which was halted during the Biden Administration- and reimpose the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which required migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico until their immigration court date.
"It is an agenda that has not been pursued across the past four years, and my guess is that it's going to focus on a combination of real, effective border security, but also an effective deportation," Treviño said.
Yang said they hope the policies are just campaign rhetoric and will translate to a more scaled-back version of a plan when he actually takes office.
ABC News reported on Friday that mass deportations is a day one priority for Trump, and his team is already hard at work on making that happen. Some experts believe that the plan could cost an estimated $88 billion. However, this week, Trump told NBC News that "there is no price tag."
"The immigration system was created to provide benefits, to control the flow of immigrants to the United States and give avenues of relief for various types of immigrants, but also preserve justice, and do it in a way where individuals are able to have their cases heard, their applications reviewed in a fair and accurate manner," Yang said. "There are always two sides to the immigration system and the way that it is here in the United States, but we need to take a comprehensive look at it. We need to look at the benefits side. We need to ensure that rights are preserved while thinking about enforcement."
It is unclear what the sweeping immigration policies will look like, but whatever the new administration does on immigration, Texas will be on the front lines of it.
It is also not clear what this will mean for Operation Lone Star, a border security program that Texas has spent more than $11 billion on since 2021. The operation has included the deployment of Department of Public Safety (DPS) Troopers and Texas National Guard troops to patrol the Southern Border to deter migrant crossings, a state-funded border wall and shipping busloads of migrants to Democratic-run cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York.
"For us in Texas, it's going to mean a variety of things that we've needed for a long time," Treviño said. "My expectation is that Texas is probably going to see an influx of resources, new coordination and new efficacy in defending Texas communities from the predations of the traffickers and the cartels that have come across our border almost unhindered."
Trump has said he wants to work with Texas to deal with the immigration issue, saying at a rally in January, "Instead of trying to send Texas a restraining order, I will send them reinforcements," while also vowing to use "every resource tool and authority of the U.S. President."
The Biden administration has tried to push back on Texas, including suing over a state law allowing state police to arrest people who enter the country illegally.
"My expectation, which I think is a rational one, is that the Trump administration is going to be very interested in cooperating with Texas," Treviño said. "I don't expect a lot of litigation and bureaucratic obstructionism that we've seen under Biden-Harris to continue under President Trump."
