Trump Signals That He’s Serious About Mass Deportation

Was Donald Trump serious about his most draconian plans for a second term? That question shadowed his whole campaign, as commentators questioned whether he’d really attempt to deport millions of immigrants or impose tariffs above 60 percent.

If personnel is policy, as the Ronald Reagan–era maxim states, then the president-elect is deadly serious. Last night, he announced that Tom Homan, who was the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, will serve as a “border czar.” And CNN reports that Stephen Miller, the leading immigration hawk in Trump’s circle, will be appointed White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

These two moves, and the fact that they are among the first to emerge from the transition, are an indication of Trump’s intent to pursue a very aggressive policy and assign it a high priority. Miller, who served as a Trump speechwriter and top adviser previously, has been a hard-liner on immigration for his entire career. He has spent the past four years building America First Legal, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for conservative causes, and was a contributor to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump term.

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of family separation]

One year ago, in an interview with The New York Times, Miller laid out a set of plans for immigration. Among other things, he said, Trump would use the military to help enforce laws, using the Insurrection Act as license. Trump has also promised to use a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, to facilitate deportation without due process under the law. Miller said ICE would focus on rounding up groups of people at job sites and other public places rather than seeking to arrest specific individuals. And he said the federal government would establish detention camps in Texas to hold people swept up in these raids.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

If Miller is the architect of mass deportation, Homan will be the builder. “There is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” (The idiosyncratic capitalization is, perhaps needless to say, his.)

[Read: Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll]

Homan was a career law-enforcement and border official, but his profile changed under Trump as he became a prominent figure, praising Trump for “taking the shackles off” ICE officers. He became the acting director of ICE at the start of Trump’s presidency and remained in that role for about a year and a half, including during the peak of Trump’s policy of family separation at the border. But Homan retired around the time Trump was forced to end that policy, frustrated that the Senate would not confirm him. As border czar, he will likely not require confirmation—though the new Republican Senate majority is expected to be more accommodating to Trump.

During the presidential campaign, Trump vowed to remove not only undocumented immigrants but also some legal ones. Only 40 percent of respondents in NBC News’s 2024 exit poll said they wanted deportation for most undocumented immigrants, but there was no reason to believe he was bluffing. During his first administration, Trump tried—persistently, though often ineffectively—to institute his priorities, especially on immigration. Trump was often stymied by courts. By the end of his first term, however, he had appointed three friendly justices to the Supreme Court—which has already granted him wide latitude with a decision on presidential immunity—and 231 judges to the lower courts, which should smooth his way now.

[Read: The secret of Trump’s economic message]

How Trump will proceed on tariffs is less immediately clear, in part because he never spoke about them with nearly the same specificity, but many corporations have already begun taking action to try to insulate themselves from any effects.

Nearly as telling as whom Trump has appointed is whom he has ruled out. On Saturday, he posted that neither Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, nor Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state, would serve in his administration. Haley criticized Trump after the January 6 riot, while Pompeo reportedly discussed removing Trump from office via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Both ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Pompeo’s campaign ended quickly; Haley ended up being Trump’s final rival standing. Both later endorsed him.

Neither of them, especially Pompeo, is a moderate—they are genuine conservatives. But they are also veteran policy makers who were in politics before Trump, and who hold some allegiance to institutions and government processes. Their exclusion is a sign not only of Trump’s long memory for a grudge but likely also of how he will seek to blast through the institutional structures and processes that have guided past presidents.

He wasn’t just offering idle promises.