politics

Bad Faith Is At The Heart of Trump's Deportation Machine

The right wing has created a crisis in order to offer their nightmare solution

Today's BFT newsletter was written by Anthony Reimer, a BFT contributor and valued member of the Bad Faith Times discord.

Crisis defines life in the United States today.

Working Americans, thanks to policies designed to serve capital at any cost, are besieged on all fronts. Inequality is only getting worse and more entrenched. Housing costs have reached the point where American families are faced with a Sophie's choice of either never owning a home or putting themselves in debt they can never hope to escape.

People can hardly afford their medicine, their groceries, and the other essentials of life. Donald Trump and the Republican Party, absent any policy that would improve people’s material lives, are doing what fascists always do: Looking for some vulnerable group to blame for all the failings of the past four decades of American leadership. This is the bad faith at the core of all fascist movements. They want you to believe it is some out-group that is causing all your various problems. If only we could eliminate this group from our lives, they say, everything would be better. American voters seemed to be OK with that arrangement as of November 5.

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From the moment Trump announced his intention to run for president in 2015, he has blamed immigrants for everything that is wrong with this country. Aside from being nakedly racist, this is false by almost every provable metric. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his ilk; over the last decade they have only gone deeper into their xenophobia. The days where people at Trump rallies chanted “Build the Wall!” will seem like a rosy bygone era compared to what Trump plans to implement in his second term: Mass deportations.

Trump and J.D. Vance both insist that if we deport the 15 million undocumented immigrants, all of our nation’s problems will fade away. Never mind that estimates put the actual number of undocumented people at around 11.5 million. Never mind that that’s actually less undocumented people than at its peak in 2008. These immigrants are draining our resources, driving up housing costs, overwhelming our hospitals, committing all the crime. They’re the only thing standing in the way of our collective American utopia.

This is, of course, bad faith bullshit. And like all bad faith, it has created a crisis in need of a solution, however vile and racist. They want you to believe undocumented people are your enemy, that they are what’s wrong with this country so you won't look at the oligarchs who are really ravaging this country, such as Shadow President Elon Musk.

Creating A Crisis To Solve It

During the 2024 election, a lot was made of Springfield, Ohio and the supposed crisis of immigrants flooding this poor, innocent (white) town. I'm not going to rehash the whole story here, but this is, in Vance’s eye, the perfect example of how an influx of migrants strain the resources of a town. It doesn’t matter that the Haitian immigrants were here legally, or that the majority of them came because the town was dying and lacked the necessary labor force. It doesn’t matter that the majority of civil servants in Springfield say the migrants have been a net positive for the town, noting their additions to the local economy. He used the mayor's request for a little aid to demonize the town's hard-working immigrant community and claim they were taking away from the deserving (white) people who lived there.

Vance used this as an example during the vice presidential debate when asked how he would fix the housing crisis. By deporting all the undocumented people in the country, he said, demand will be lowered and everyone will be able to afford a home. This was interpreted by mainstream media outlets as a serious housing policy. Democrats proposed building more homes; Republicans proposed genocide. Who's to say which is better?

Deporting working families will not solve the nation's housing crisis, but you already knew that. Deporting immigrants would remove the very people we need to build more homes and help alleviate the pain of the housing crisis. It is hard enough to build in America with NIMBY town councils who are only worried about their home value. Remove around 13 percent of the construction workforce, and what do they think is going to happen to the cost of building new houses? Construction companies are already dealing with a tight labor pool, with an estimated 370,000 open positions. Removing 1.5 million workers from their labor pool will cause fewer homes to be built while driving up the cost of those that are built. The supposed lowered demand will be far outpaced by the lowered supply.

This will be felt throughout the entire American economy. It is estimated that the loss of workers would lower the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. For reference, the GDP dropped by 4.3 percent during the Great Recession of 2008 – the largest economic collapse since the Depression. You think grocery inflation is bad now? Just wait until the Trump regime deports 25 percent of the nation's agricultural workforce.

This isn't a matter of “taking American jobs"; there aren't enough Americans willing to work these jobs. The food will rot on the vine and what gets picked and shipped will cost two to three times as much, if not more. More than just a labor force, undocumented people are also tax payers. Despite what right-wing media would have your parents believe, immigrants aren’t living off government benefits. Undocumented people are a net benefit to our tax base, contributing $22.6 billion dollars a year to Social Security and $5.7 billion a year to Medicare, both benefits they will never receive. We are already an aging population. As the baby boomers retire and need Social Security, we need as many people paying into that system as possible.

The economic impact of Trump's planned deportations would be devastating and that’s without factoring in how much arresting, detaining, and deporting 3.3 percent of the nation’s population would cost. It is estimated that the cost of deporting 1 million people a year for the next ten years would be $88 billion a year (don't wait around for media outlets to ask Republicans how they're going to pay for that). Most of that money would go toward concentration camps.

That is just the cost in terms of dollars and cents. So far, I’ve tried to remove emotion and just give you hard and cold facts about how mass deportation would be devastating to the United States, to show how it would be harmful to the lives of the very people who hold up mass deportation signs at Trump rallies.

We cannot, however, ignore the moral cost to a society shoveling migrants into concentration camps. The collective trauma that will be endured to the families facing deportation will be immense. There will be mothers ripped from the arms of their children and put on a bus and taken to a camp, where they will be held indefinitely. There will be ICE agents going into businesses, into homes, suspected of harboring undocumented people. Latino people, regardless of immigration status, will be harassed by federal agents and made to constantly prove their citizenship status.

Good if horrifying insight into the bad-faith argument for mass deportations.

There will be children living in horrid, dehumanizing conditions waiting to be dropped in the middle of a foreign country with no infrastructure in place to care for them when they get there. This trauma will not just be endured by the people being harassed and detained. It will be felt by an entire nation watching their government treat human beings this way. This will not be some far-off group of immigrants being brutalized by a fiendish government. These people will be your neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. The cruelty will not just be a byproduct, it will be the point. They want to make this as cruel and dehumanizing as possible to both frighten people into fleeing the country and to show people in other countries exactly how we treat refugees here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

In case Latinos who voted for Trump think they will be safe because they were born here, they will not. Trump administration officials are already looking into expanding their ability to denaturalize citizens, taking away their rights as an American. They want to deport American citizens who are the children of undocumented people. This is blatantly unconstitutional, but we will be relying on a Supreme Court that is a captured institution ready and willing to advance the fascist project at any cost.

All of what I’ve laid out is not just hyperbole. This isn't just Trump running his mouth about things he never actually hopes to accomplish. As I write this, Donald Trump’s chief immigration monster Stephen Miller is putting these plans into effect. He has already laid out plans to mobilize the National Guard in red states. He knows where he can reallocate funds to build his concentration camps so that he can bypass Congress. He has a step by step plan on how to implement this and how to counter efforts to stop him. This is their chief policy goal. They believe they have a mandate to implement it.

Since mass deportation won’t help the housing crisis, won’t make anything cheaper, and won’t improve the life of average Americans in any way, why are fascists so insistent on implementing it? The answer is white supremacy. The racist assholes who are spearheading the charge subscribe to what is known as the White Replacement Theory, a far right conspiracy that says white people are being replaced by migrants from Central and South America in order to seize political power and subjugate the white race. This is, quite literally, Nazi shit.

The theory has been around for a long time and 100-150 years ago Anglo Americans used it to demonize Italian and Irish immigrants with these same wild-eyed conspiracy theories. It shouldn’t matter if we’re a “minority majority” country, but these clowns completely ignore that the concept of “whiteness” has constantly shifted throughout American history. A hundred years ago, Italians weren’t considered “white." Through various processes of assimilation and cultural evolution, they are today considered white by everyone besides the most hardline racists. So even by their own racist metrics, we will never be a “majority minority” country. White supremacy will simply change the definition of white to include previous minority groups and maintain its stranglehold on American political power.

Here’s the thing about fascism: In order to survive it must constantly find an out-group to attack. Since their ideology is built on the bad faith foundation that some marginalized group is responsible for all the ills of society, once they eliminate that group and it doesn’t solve all the problems, they have to find someone else to blame. So even if they are successful in their goal of deporting all 11 million undocumented people, it will not solve the housing crisis or the cost of groceries. No one in good faith would ever believe mass deportations would solve those issues. This argument could only be made in the worst possible faith.

It will only make things worse. By then, we will have given them all the necessary infrastructure to go after anyone else they deem to be an enemy of society. They aren’t just going to let those camps sit empty, after all. There's money to be made by the companies building these big, beautiful camps.

Unfortunately, there isn't a ton we can do as individuals. Trump will be the president and he falsely believes he won with a mandate to implement mass deportations. The first step you can take is simply to let any undocumented people in your life know that you have their back. A simple text saying, “I'm here if you ever need me” can go a long way, particularly because the Trump administration will rely on undocumented people fearing them and self deporting. This is an understandable impulse. If you're going to eventually be kicked out of a country, it's much easier to do it on your own terms – no knock on the door at 3 in the morning from jackbooted government thugs. This, however, is doing their work for them. So letting someone know that they have a support system in this country will help assuage them.

Another way to fight back will be through your local elected officials. America is a federalist system; it’s time we use that to our advantage. There are ways local and state politicians can fight back against the encroachment of the federal government. Some elected Democrats have already pledged that they will push back against Trump's deportation regime. We need to let our representatives know that we expect them to fight the Trump administration with every tool at their disposal, and that they will pay a political price if they fail to do so.

Despite what Republicans would have you believe, undocumented people don't vote. They have no political voice in our system. We need to be their voice. Non-compliance will be necessary at every step of society in order to battle this hostile administration.

The next four years are going to be hard on all of us, and worse for some than for others. We need to achieve some level of solidarity and do everything we can to protect the most marginalized among us.

Follow Anthony Reimer on BlueSky at @areimer.bsky.social.