‘Mass Deportation Now’ plans fall apart under scrutiny, for Kansas and U.S. That’s not the point. • Kansas Reflector

He wouldn’t say the name.

Surrounded by delegates waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs during the Republican National Convention, NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff — winner of several awards for his reporting, as well as his book on immigration policy — refused to repeat the name of the Eisenhower Administration program upon which former President Trump models his “largest deportation program in American history.”

It’s an offensive name, and racist, Soboroff told his colleagues in the studio.

Ike’s effort flopped. It repatriated only a scant faction of targeted immigrants.

Scores died in hell-hole ships returning them to Mexico. Corrupt growers thwarted attempts to detain workers. Its leader, who had been convicted years earlier of killing a Latino man, folded the program after a year.

Trump’s proposal is destined to the same fate, but that doesn’t matter to him or his followers.

The mass deportation pledge of 2024 is this year’s wall: Trump’s shorthand to incite his followers. The wall became the signature issue in his 2016 campaign. In his acceptance speech, Trump falsely claimed that most of it is finished.

The U.S.-Mexico border is 2,000 miles long. During his administration, the United States constructed just 50 miles of new border wall.

And Mexico didn’t pay.

But a real wall was not the goal, just as a legislative solution to border security was never the point. Trump told us so. He demanded his congressional allies oppose a bipartisan border bill so he could campaign on the issue. They did, and they don’t have a solution.

Now his supporters are waving Mass Deportation Now signs but know nothing about the proposal. It is devoid of detail, cost estimates and without regard for the consequences.

How would Kansas find the personnel and money for Trump’s plan? The state’s comparatively small population of undocumented migrants outnumbers — by nearly eight to one — its law enforcement force. Kansas would have to detail every single law enforcement officer — state, county, and local — solely to the door-to-door sweeps, traffic stops and detention activities the program would require.

It could easily cost as much as $770 million in Kansas alone.

Who would be detained? The French native who overstayed her visa by two years to live with her law firm partner boyfriend in Overland Park, or the undocumented Honduran working construction in Pratt, married, with children, and in the country for 15 years?

Nearly two-thirds of the undocumented migrants in Kansas have been here longer than 10 years; only an extremely small proportion have arrived in the last five years. The same share is married, more than 10% of them to U.S. citizens. More than half own their homes.

Which families will be torn apart? Who makes those decisions?

There aren’t enough lawyers and courts in Kansas to handle the inevitable avalanche of legal challenges.

Which buildings would go unbuilt, which factories would close, which farms and restaurants would limp along understaffed?

For every two unfilled jobs in Kansas, there is only one available worker, a ratio that would balloon to crippling levels. National studies suggest a drastic drop in growth if immigrants are removed from the work force; the Kansas economy is not immune.

What about the downstream costs?

The state and local budgets would suffer an immediate shock of lost revenues. Contrary to what Trump said at his convention, undocumented migrants cannot receive Social Security or Medicare, but the taxes they pay on their wages help finance these programs. They pay state and local taxes, too — taxes that help pay for the salaries of the public officials who would remove them.

Wouldn’t the crime rate fall?

The crime rate is already falling. It has dropped sharply in the last few years. Native U.S. citizens are far more likely to commit crimes than immigrants, far more. So, no.

The answers to these questions, the details, and fallout don’t matter to Trump and his followers, including most Kansas Republican office holders and candidates. They are irrelevant to the real point.

The attack on the other, the retrograde false dream of a country of white, Anglo-Saxon Christians, is being unleashed solely to get votes.

“Mass Deportation Now?” It’s a base appeal to the worst in politics.

If Ike’s program is the proposal’s model, its demagogic forebearers are Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare; Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever;” President Reagan’s “welfare queens” and President George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton; and even Trump’s own Muslim ban. It sits with them in the abyss of political rhetoric.

Soboroff was right.

The name of the Trump model is offensive, degrading, and, thankfully, disappeared from contemporary discourse. But it’s important to know it — and say it, once — to understand the depths of the division Trump is sowing: Operation W–back.

We banished that racist term from our lexicon, as we should have. Its 2024 descendant deserves the same fate.

Raised in McPherson, Greg Frazier served in high-level positions at the USDA and Office of the United States Trade Representative, as well as on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He has extensive experience dealing with the Chinese government. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.