Burningbird

I had planned on writing about Project 2025 and its emphasis on deportation—particularly its unstated but understood emphasis on deporting people Who Are Not White. But I got caught up in the sheer impossibility of Project 2025 and Trump’s grand ideas of mass deportation. What they want, is insane.

Thankfully, in the last few weeks, other media companies, profit or otherwise, took up the challenge. And they did a good job of it. I could have wished they had done so before people starting voting, but better late than never.

ProPublica has done a series of stories on immigration under the main title of The New Immigration. Not only did the nonprofit cover the data that overwhelmed me, it also put a human face on the story of immigration in our country.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

This week, both the Vegas Sun and the Texas Observer noted how chaotic Trump’s deportation plans would be for their states of Nevada and Texas. Yet, in Texas at least, state legislators embrace Trump’s plans.

Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—second in the United States only to California—and another roughly 1.4 million U.S. citizens in the state live with at least one undocumented family member, per studies in recent years. Unauthorized workers form the backbone of crucial sectors; in the construction industry, up to 50 percent of laborers building the state are undocumented, according to a 2013 survey by the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project. All this means Texas would be uniquely disrupted by Trump’s plans, with the tearing apart of mixed-status families placing a possibly massive burden on the state’s meager social services systems, and the exiling of a chunk of its workforce imperiling the economic development and affordability known as the so-called Texas Miracle.

Yet Texas’ statewide Republican leaders are full-throated backers of a Trump return to the White House, leaving dissenters within the immigrant and business community and Democratic Party to advocate for millions of Texas families, workers, and consumers.

Vox called into question the polls that seemingly show most people in the US favor mass deportation. As it found, though, the polls don’t capture the complexity of the issue. (Polls rarely do.)

CBS News noted the impossibly high price tag associated with mass deportation. Business Insider noted how mass deportation would gut the construction industry. And economists warn that Trump’s mass deportation in addition to his plans on tariffs on all international goods will tank the economy.

What is rarely mentioned in any of these news stories, however, is how truly unAmerican mass deportation is. We are a land of immigrants. Immigration and the diversity that has come from immigration are our greatest strengths. In addition, the people most targeted for deportation are not the enemy; migration is not an invasion. People from south and central America are our neighbors. Folks from the islands just off the main land are our neighbors.

To cherry pick out a few bad actors and ignore the vast numbers of hard-working people just trying to build a better life for their families is to ignore what drove our own ancestors to this land. And to target people of color—and make no mistake, Trump and his minions are targeting people of color—is to enshrine racism and bigotry. We the People becomes We the White People, or even We the White People Who Think the Same.

I’d like to think we’re better than that. Even with the ugliness that all too often forms the basis of a Trump rally, I still want to hold on to the belief that we’re better than that.