What Trump's mass deportation plan might look like if he wins the election | 60 Minutes

with nine days until election day former president Trump has stepped up his attacks on the Biden Harris administration's record on illegal immigration and pledged that if elected he'll conduct the largest deportation in American history there are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States about 3% of the population nearly 80% of them have lived in the country for a decade or more how realistic is this Mass deportation campaign promise what would be the human and financial cost we took these questions to one of the people Donald Trump has said would join him

if he wins a second term Tom homman who led immigration enforcement during the first Trump Administration when thousands of Migrant children were separated from their parents at the border the story will continue in a moment I hear a lot of people say you know the talk of a mass deportation is racist is uh is threatening to the Immigrant Community it's not threaten to the Immigrant Community it should be threatening to the illegal immigrant Community but on the heels of historic illegal immigration crisis that has to be done how you doing at the Republican National Convention

this summer Tom homman was the proud pitch man of mass deportation I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country you better start packing now over three decades he worked his way up from border patrolman to acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement the agency known as ice during the first year and a half of the Trump Administration this election cycle former president Trump has mentioned Mass deportation at nearly every rally will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country because we have no choice

what would the largest deportation in American history look like to you well let me tell you what's not going to be first it's not going to be a a mass sweep of neighborhoods it's not going to be building concentration camps I've read it all it's ridiculous but if Mass deportation is not going to be as you said massive sweeps and concentration camps they'll be concentr they'll be targeted arrest we'll know who we're going to rest where we're most likely to find them based on numerous in you know investigative processes here is our message former president

Trump's running mate JD Vance said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year Trump's top immigration adviser Steven Miller told a conservative audience that Deportes would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation so you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds and that's where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home you deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement Stephen Miller said that this will involve large scale raids I I don't use the term raids but

you're probably talking about worksite enforcement operations uh which this Administration pretty much stopped workplace enforcement that's a Roundup and that's going to be necessary worksite enforcement operation just not about people who's working illegally in the country and companies that hire them that's going to undercut their competition that has US citizen employees it's where we find a lot of trafficking case know women and children who are forced in a force labor to pay off the smuggling fees a study by the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation could result in the removal of millions of construction

hospitality and agriculture workers reducing the GDP by $1.7 trillion can you just limit it to criminals and national security threat though if I'm in charge this my priorities are Public Safety threats and National Security threats first first implies others follow though right absolutely so game that out for me what's scenario it's not okay to enter a country illegally which is a crime that's what drives illegal immigration when there's no consequences the Biden Harris Administration has proven this you can get to the Border turn yourselves in get released within 24 hours so you are carrying out

a targeted enforcement operation Grandma's in the house she's undocumented she get arrested too it depends which let the judge decide we're going to remove people that that judge has already deported homman suggest that grandma might face arrest would Mark a major shift in policy under President Biden Isis mostly targeting those deemed National Security or Public Safety threats and people who just crossed the border illegally the majority of the 4 million deportations carried out by the Biden Administration have occurred at the southern border where an unprecedented influx of migrants created scen of chaos a humanitarian crisis

and one of Vice President Harris's biggest political vulnerabilities homman says Mass deportation is the solution how many people would be deported that's that's you can't have question why not how many officers do I have is there a written plan on this now that I know of if there's no memo if there's no plan is this fully baked we've done a before but not a a deportation of this scale Isis is very good at these operations this is what they do to see what they do we went to Silver Spring Maryland a suburb of Washington DC

where earlier this month ice agents gathered in a parking lot Before Dawn it's what ice does every day and has been doing for many years all right good morning everyone their task this morning locate and arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal histories including assault robbery drug and gun convictions this morning our Target is going to be identified by Ice as a threat to Public Safety hey let's roll Matt Elliston director of Ice's Baltimore Field office told us the goal was to catch the first Target by surprise you've been watching him you you know his routine yeah

we know his routine we've been watching him for a couple days wait till he gets about in front of my vehicle so sure enough a white van soon appeared to pick him up but they didn't get very far hey how you doing what you got in your hand what did you put down the man they arrested was a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction who had been ordered deported by a judge 5 years ago the ice agents discovered that the driver of the van was also in the country illegally they told us he'd been deported

once before he has no criminal record and he was picking up his employee to go to work it doesn't make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today a lot of folks might hear you and say like hold on you've got an undocumented immigrant who comes face to face with ice who's responsible for deporting folks from this country and you let them go we utilize immigration law to enhance Public Safety it's not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across right we do

targeted enforcement in ice it took a team of more than a dozen officers 7 hours to arrest six people and that doesn't include the many hours spent searching for them oh my God so how would it even be possible then for ice to arrest a million people in this country if that mass deportation plan were to take effect I could say here in Maryland we would never be able to resource or find that find that amount of detention which would be our biggest challenge right and just the amount of money that that would cost in

order to detain everybody uh you know it would be you know at the Department of Defense level of financing it's insane to think about it at this sort of scale Jason Hower ice Chief of Staff during the first two years of the Biden Administration y go and take it off for me oh okay says it costs $150 a night to detain people like those we saw arrested the average stay as they await deportation is 46 days one deportation flight can cost a quar of a million dollars and that assumes the Home Country will accept them

many like Cuba and Venezuela rarely do ice currently has some 6,000 law enforcement agents how much Manpower would it take to arrest and Deport a million people you're talking 100,000 uh official officers uh police officers Detention officers support staff management staff Trump adviser Steven Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies like the DEA the idea that you're going to take the FBI or the Marshall service or the Bureau of Prisons or the Secret Service or FEMA off of their mission sets that protect and protect our communities will not make us safer by

the um officing of the immigration okay immigration enforcement requires specialized training and language skills that most military and Law Enforcement Officers don't have there's this discussion out there that makes it sound like it's just an easy swap it is not an easy swap so what I could tell you in from the immigration and nationality act immigration law is second to the US tax code in complexity we have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year I don't know if that's accurate or not is that what American

taxpayers should expect what price do you put on National Security is it worth it is there a way to carry out Mass Deport ation without separating families of course is families can be deported together Monica kamacho Perez and her family worry about that they have lived and worked in the country since coming illegally from Mexico more than 20 years ago what scares you the most I think of of my nieces and my nephews that they're going to get separated from their parents they made a life in Baltimore where Monica who's 30 teaches English as a

second language we are a normal family like anybody else right we go to church we work every day we pay taxes she's among the more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who are protected from deportation under the deferred action for childhood arrivals program known as DACA I'm the only one now that's like protected while my parents are not my brothers are not my brothers have uh children that are born here so if they were to get deported what will happen to their kids although I have my life here I think that

I would take the decision to go back with my parents to take care of them you would yes you own a home here this is the city you grew up in but they're also part of my American dream and I can't imagine living here without them like Monica's nieces and nephews more than 4 million us-born children live with an undocumented parent why should a child who is an American citizen have to pack up and move to a country that they don't know because their parent obviously enter the country illegally had a child knowing he was

in the country illegally so he created that crisis while homman ran ice in what became one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration at least 5,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents who were prosecuted for crossing the border illegally you've been called the father of Trump's family separation policy how's that sit with you it's not true uh I didn't write the memorandum of separate families I signed a memo why did I sign a memo I was hoping to save lives while you and I are talking right now a child is going

to die in AB border so we thought maybe if we prosecute people they'll stop coming maybe and if Trump wins a second term I don't know of any form of policy but they're talking about family separation should it be on the table it needs to be considered absolutely do you think a mass deportation plan would deter other people from coming to this country illegally no I don't think so regardless people are still going to try to come for a better life