Editorial: Despite promising to crack down on the undocumented, Trump clearly hasn’t thought through his immigration plans

Donald J. Trump won the White House in part based on his castigation of undocumented immigrants. With his inauguration Friday, and with his first executive actions expected as soon as Friday afternoon, some of those words are about to become deeds. Judging from the early details offered by his transition team, there is much here to be worried about. And internal contradictions among some of the emerging details suggest the incoming administration has not spent sufficient time thinking through its approach to illegal immigration and the fresh problems its solutions will likely create.

For instance, Trump has said he wants to “work something out” to help the so-called “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought here as minors. But one of the first things he’s expected to do is cancel President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, under which 750,000 of them received two-year reprieves from deportation and permission to work. Canceling DACA would expose hundreds of thousands of those young people to deportation and deny them the work permits they may need to survive here.

Trump also is expected to resume work-site raids and jail visits by immigration agents to find the undocumented immigrants, but that would take a significant increase in manpower as well as facilities in which to hold the detainees, most of whom would have the right to a hearing before they are kicked out of the country. With only 40,000 beds budgeted for, how will the administration handle the logistics — especially when Trump has also pledged to round up the estimated 800,000 people against whom deportation orders have already been issued?

And then there’s the wall. The Trump administration may try to use existing funds already budgeted for Border Patrol infrastructure to start construction of the wall on the Mexican border, hoping to recoup the costs later from Mexico. Estimates put the cost of the wall as high as $38 billion, but like so much else Trump has talked about, the lack of specifics makes estimates iffy. And if Mexico refuses to pay, as its top officials have said repeatedly they will do, Trump says he’ll get the money through a tax on remittances sent by people living here to their families back in Mexico. But those remittances total only about $24 billion a year, and about half of it comes from the very people Trump says he’ll be kicking out.

This is foolishness. If Trump really tries to fulfill his promise to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., it would cause significant harm to families and communities, drive those here illegally further underground (goodbye, traceable remittances) and probably harm the sectors of the economy, such as construction and agriculture, in which the undocumented work. The only reasonable path forward is for Trump to work with Congress on comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the presence of undocumented immigrants — including a path to legalization for those who deserve it.

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