Donald Trump made mass deportation a key campaign pillar, promising to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants on day one.
In the wake of Tuesday’s election, the Immigration Project held its fall luncheon Friday at Illinois State University's Bone Center, focusing on how immigrant communities may be affected by a second Trump administration.
Keynote speaker Demian Kogan of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights [ICIRR] said dehumanizing rhetoric about immigration and deportation leads to cruel policies.
“The other thing that’s really important to put contextually is the reason for migration,” said Kogan in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “People do it out of desperation. Oftentimes they do it because their lives are threatened. They do it because it’s difficult to survive.”
For Kogan, it’s personal. His family fled Argentina in the late 1970s when his oldest sister was very young.
“They lived their whole lives in Buenos Aires,” he said. “They had to make a choice based on the situation at the time.”
Immigrant rights advocates like the Immigration Project and ICIRR are left questioning whether to take Trump’s campaign promise seriously or literally.
“We know what Donald Trump is capable of,” Kogan said. “We saw it in the first term. When someone tells you what they’re going to do, you should believe them.”
Trump is likely to face insurmountable legal, practical and financial challenges. But he’s more likely than last time to surround himself with amenable advisors. The Senate has flipped to Republican control, with the U.S. House of Representatives still up for grabs. A unified congress and White House could clear a pathway for Trump. Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, he said keeping his key campaign promise “has no price tag.”
“There is a real concern that the second iteration of the Trump administration is going to be unhinged,” said Kogan. “Where we were seeing resistance and push back from his own party, there is real concern that a lot of that internal resistance from Republican legislators might not exist.”
Gov. JB Pritzker has said in no uncertain terms that he will resist mass deportation in Illinois.
Prior legislation backs him up. The 2017 Illinois TRUST Act prevents state and local law enforcement from assisting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] authorities with deportation. In 2021, the Illinois Way Forward Act shored up the state’s efforts to end ICE detention and gave Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul authority to investigate TRUST Act violations.
ICIRR is preparing anyway, through a multi-pronged approach that includes relaunching a statewide deportation defense structure of “know your rights” trainings, re-upping rapid response protocols, lobbying state officials to ensure Illinois enforces policies like the TRUST Act, and coalition building.
A false correlation
Campaign rhetoric has conflated undocumented immigrants with an influx of asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border, with Trump and J.D. Vance using inflammatory false statements about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, to prop up their mass deportation plan.
“Those were dog whistles that were intentionally racist to rev up the base that that message resonates with,” Kogan said. “It is true there has been an increase in folks seeking asylum at the border and many of those people call Illinois their home. That is within their full legal rights. None of them are here without authorization.”
Thus, symbolic moves to declare cities, counties and states as “non-sanctuary” places for immigrants, as was proposed and rejected by the McLean County Board earlier this year, do not apply to migrants seeking asylum.
“People use an anti-immigrant rhetoric of, ‘They should do it the right way,’” said Kogan. “In this case, by their own definition and standards, they did it the right way.”
Kogan said four decades of congressional stalemate also has contributed to the escalation in undocumented immigrants. If legal pathways were more accessible, he said, people would use them — evidenced by relief programs like DACA.
Immigration and the economy
Economists say immigrants are vital to the United States’ workforce. Perhaps paradoxically, concerns over the economy were voters’ primary reason for sending Trump back to the White House, since mass deportation, if enacted, could have detrimental effects on the economy.
“It’s undeniable that there will be a negative impact on the economy if this happens,” said Kogan. “But we do want to stress that that is not a sufficient reason to talk about the contributions of immigrants. These are inherently valuable people. Many of them left their home countries just to provide a better future for their children.”
