A guy on the deport-immigrants ticket claims that ‘illegal’ is fungible

By any honest assessment, there are millions of people living in the United States who are not authorized to be here. Some of them crossed the southern border from Mexico. Many arrived on visas and never left.

When Donald Trump left office in January 2021, there were probably about 10.5 million foreign-born residents of the U.S. who were here illegally. Analysis from the Migration Policy Institute suggests that nearly two-thirds of them had been here for at least a decade. About a third have kids who are citizens.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, like to talk about a much larger number of immigrants, however. Vance, for example, lamented at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday that the U.S. “cannot import 25 million illegal aliens and expect that that is going to be the path to prosperity.” We will get to the point about prosperity in a bit, but let’s focus for now on that number: 25 million, an increase of nearly 140 percent over the figure in 2021.

It is flatly wrong, a combination of misrepresenting data on immigration and rhetorical inflation. There have been millions of immigrants stopped at the border since President Joe Biden took office — but the operative word there is “stopped.” Many were turned away, particularly under a covid-era policy allowing the government to do so. Many remain in detention. There have been several million who have been granted release by government officials to await adjudication of their requests for asylum, but because of that allowance they are not in the country illegally even if they entered the country illegally.

There have been immigrants who entered the country illegally and remain without authorization, perhaps 2 million of them since 2021. For obvious reasons, this figure is hard to estimate, but the government has methods for doing so.

Among those in the country legally are the Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, who have been the focus of Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent weeks. Unrest and natural disasters in that country drove an increase in Haitians seeking to move to the United States, an increase that was accommodated in part by granting them temporary protected status (as articulated under federal law). The Biden administration also extended an immigration parole program to cover immigrants from Haiti, as the Migration Policy Institute explained in November.

At that same rally in North Carolina, though, Vance rejected the idea that these administrative decisions equaled legality.

“The media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … are here legally,” he said. “What they mean is that [Vice President] Kamala Harris used two separate programs — mass parole and temporary protective status — she used two programs to wave a wand and to say, ‘we’re not going to deport those people here.’ ”

“Well,” he continued, “if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

Complaints about the way in which the administration extended parole were originally used in the House impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Then, the complaint was that Mayorkas “paroled aliens en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention.” Now, since Harris is the person Trump’s running against, Vance has her doing the wand-waving.

Regardless, the slippery slope here is immediately obvious. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier pointed out, even if the decisions made by the administration were overturned, “the people who entered under are certainly not here illegally under any interpretation of the law.” Vance, he added, is “abolishing the difference between legal and illegal.” Which is the point. It is up to Vance and Trump to decide who counts as “illegal,” not the law — and therefore it is Vance and Trump who can decide which people will be subject to the massive deportation effort that Trump has authorized.

Immediately, we see the threat posed to the Haitian immigrants living and working legally in the United States. In a number of small cities and towns, including Springfield, Ohio, right-wing agitators have targeted immigrant workers for criticism online, even in the face of pushback from Republican elected officials and local leaders. There’s a fundamental presentation of immigrants as undesirable, even when local communities are eager for workers — seeing them as a path to prosperity, to use Vance’s words — and the immigrants used legal channels to remain in the U.S.

Were Trump president, would his deportation force follow guidelines articulated by government lawyers? Or would they target those who attract Trump’s and Vance’s attention?

When Trump was president, his administration implemented a process by which foreign-born naturalized citizens could see their citizenship stripped away, a process that Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted in October. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that thousands of U.S. citizens had come into the Trump administration’s sights; just because the government had said they were American and welcome to stay did not mean that Trump’s government would grant them those same accommodations. This process, Miller promised, would be “turbocharged” if Trump wins in November.

Vance’s comments in North Carolina were an effort to pivot the criticism he’s faced since his rhetoric and that of his allies preceded a spike in threats against people and property in the state he represents. But the rhetoric isn’t subtle. As with citizenship, a second Trump administration would determine what pathways to residency are “illegal” and therefore invalid and, presumably, those immigrants would then be targeted for potential deportation. It’s inherently subjective — which would probably be seen by many Trump supporters as a benefit. If immigrants think they might be next to have their status rescinded, to hear a knock on the door from federal agents, those individuals might decide to leave the country of their own volition.

Vance’s allies and supporters are already on the hunt for examples of other immigrants who fail to adhere to their standard of acceptability — often Black and Hispanic immigrants fleeing unrest and insecurity. The message the potential next vice president offered them Wednesday was simple: All bets are off.