What would Donald Trump’s mass deportations really mean? | The Excerpt

On Tuesday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Donald Trump is calling for mass deportations if he’s elected. Paste BN national reporter Lauren Villagran breaks down the costs and logistical hurdles to his plan. Trump faces a new lawsuit – this time accusing him of defaming the men who were exonerated after being labeled the “Central Park Five.” TV personality Dr. Phil testified Monday on behalf of Robert Roberson, a man convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter Nikki in 2002. Here's a link to our interview with former Assistant Chief of Detectives Brian Wharton who helped to put Roberson on death row but who now believes he is innocent. Several life-saving pediatric cancer drugs are in shortage and advocates say that corporate greed is partly to blame. The debate over when pregnancy begins is causing confusion and access problems for women who are seeking birth control. USA Today national correspondent Elizabeth Weise talks about the war over contraceptives.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Sara Ganim:

Good morning. I'm Sara Ganim filling in for Taylor Wilson. Today is Tuesday, October 22nd 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, Trump calls for mass deportation if he's elected. We break down the costs and logistical hurdles. Plus another Trump lawsuit. This time, the Central Park Five sues him for defamatory statements made during last month's presidential debate. And birth control joins abortion as a controversial issue across several conservative states.

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We are in the final two weeks until election day and voters continue to say that one of the major issues they're considering is immigration reform. Which under a second Donald Trump presidency could look very different than it did under the first one. Paste BN National Reporter Lauren Villagran breaks down his plan and how it might work. Lauren, thanks so much for joining me.

Lauren Villagran:

Thanks, Sara.

Sara Ganim:

So Donald Trump has spent a fair amount of both of his campaigns for president and talking about immigration reform. If he wins, will things be different this time than they were the last time he was president?

Lauren Villagran:

Well, we're going to have to see, but certainly the conditions are different. We know that the first time around in 2015, as he was campaigning, he made immigration and deporting the nation's roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants, a cornerstone of that campaign, but he was stopped by numerous obstacles during his first administration. Some of those were legal. There were many legal challenges to some of his border and immigration enforcement programs. And of course he had never been president before so his administration didn't have a lot of experience dealing with a massive federal bureaucracy. Those things are certainly different this time around. The courts look very different and American public opinion has shifted in some ways.

Sara Ganim:

How much would deportation cost?

Lauren Villagran:

So the best estimate we have right now is from the nonpartisan American Immigration Council. They looked at the cost of an administration attempting to deport 1 million people per year. And they pin that cost at $88 billion annually. Now, it should be said that no previous administration has ever reached those kinds of numbers. The highest we ever saw in terms of interior immigration enforcement was during President Barack Obama's administration when he deported more than 400,000 people in a single year.

Sara Ganim:

And how exactly would this happen logistically?

Lauren Villagran:

Yeah. Well, of course this is a bit speculative because Donald Trump has not released a detailed plan of how he would accomplish this promise that he makes at nearly every one of his political rallies. But former members of his administration, and they have helped sketch out how a mass deportation could be achieved. Certainly it would require state and local law enforcement cooperation. The databases that local law enforcement have access to were really woven together with ICE during the Obama Administration, so that infrastructure exists to help locate people. There's also been talk of detaining people ahead of their removal. And right now the capability just isn't there. But there's certainly an expectation that a second Trump Administration would ramp up detention capability for US immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Sara Ganim:

The story you wrote really isn't focused on the merits of the plan, but on the logistics of how this would play out. What does polling show about what American voters think about this?

Lauren Villagran:

Well, we know that Americans are deeply divided. A new Paste BN, Suffolk University poll shows that 45% of Americans support Trump's plan for a mass deportation while 49% oppose it. I think there has been a lot written about why a mass deportation could be disruptive to society from families to local economies. But supporters of Trump's mass deportation plan are adamant that folks who may have overstayed visas or who are living in the country illegally should be deported. And critics of his plan say that a massive deportation of so many millions of people with very varying personal and legal situations would not only be unfeasible, but potentially cruel.

Sara Ganim:

We talked about the logistics, but what are the obstacles to actually executing this plan?

Lauren Villagran:

So right now, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the immigration detention side of things, is funded to detain about 34,000 people per day. To really ramp that up would require a massive influx of resources, staffing, potentially private contractors. We do know that existing US law provides that immigrants in many cases can plead their case before an immigration judge. And the immigration courts are facing a backlog of 3.5 million cases, so that process in itself could take months or years. It's not clear yet how a second Trump Administration would propose to ramp up detention capacity to the level that would be required to accomplish what he's trying to do.

Sara Ganim:

Lauren Villagran covers immigration for Paste BN. Lauren, thank you so much.

Lauren Villagran:

Thanks for having me.

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Sara Ganim:

Members of the Central Park Five, also known as the Exonerated Five, are suing former President Donald Trump, saying that he made false, misleading and defamatory comments during the presidential debate on ABC News last month. Attorneys for the five men filed the federal lawsuit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday. The complaint says that during the debate, Trump falsely said that the Central Park Five members killed someone and pled guilty to the crime in 1989. All five men have had their convictions overturned and their sentences vacated by a court in 2002. New York City agreed to pay the men $41 million for its conduct during the investigation. Trump has long been criticized for his role in this story. When it happened, he took out a full-page New York Times ad calling for the men to be executed.

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The Food and Drug Administration says that several pediatric cancer drugs are in shortage, most notably, a chemotherapy drug often used for treating leukemia, brain tumors and other cancers affecting children. These drugs are susceptible to shortages because only a few companies make them. The problem, according to experts, is that the medications are inexpensive and they don't turn much profit. So many drug companies opt not to manufacture them. Advocates are pushing for incentives for drug makers that would increase supply and provide more alternatives if something goes wrong in the supply chain.

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Dr. Phil McGraw:

And not to bury the lead, I am 100% convinced that we're facing a miscarriage of justice here.

Sara Ganim:

That is the voice of TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw, more commonly known as Dr. Phil, testifying Monday at a Texas House Committee on behalf of Robert Roberson, a man convicted of murdering his two-year-old daughter Nikki back in 2002 in a case of shaken baby syndrome or SBS. Roberson was scheduled for execution last Thursday and would have been the first man executed in the US for SBS, a cause that has been repeatedly questioned by some medical professionals who call it junk science. The Texas Supreme Court spared Roberson's life last week, giving him a 30-day reprieve. But Governor Greg Abbott on Monday questioned their authority, saying only his office could grant clemency.

Also testifying on Monday was a former juror who had voted to convict Roberson. Telling the committee that had she known medical science presented was questionable, she would not have voted that way. What's next in the case is unclear as the Governor's Office, the Attorney General and the House Committee scramble to assert their control over Roberson's life. To listen to Paste BN's interview with Brian Wharton, the Assistant Chief of Detectives who now says Roberson is innocent, we have a link in today's show notes.

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The debate over when pregnancy begins is causing confusion and access problems for women who are seeking birth control. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise talked to me about the war over contraceptives. Thank you, Elizabeth, so much for talking to me.

Elizabeth Weise:

Happy to be here.

Sara Ganim:

Your story centers on a debate between experts and lawmakers over what defines a pregnancy and a belief that some contraceptives can cause abortions. Why is there so much confusion?

Elizabeth Weise:

Yeah, there is a lot of confusion here. So effectively what this is, if you ask the medical profession, they would say that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants into a woman's uterus. However, there are people who believe that pregnancy begins as soon as an egg is fertilized. And for those folks, if you destroy a fertilized egg that is in effect in abortion. So there are conservative lawmakers in multiple states, seven specifically, but where they have either succeeded in or attempted to block certain forms of birth control because they believe that they can destroy fertilized eggs and therefore count as abortions. And they call them abortifacients.

Sara Ganim:

And what are these contraceptives that are considered abortifacients to certain lawmakers?

Elizabeth Weise:

There are two methods of contraception at the center of this debate. The first is the IUD. Most of those work by either thickening the cervical mucus so sperm can't get to the uterus or stopping ovulation or making it so the sperm can't swim. There's also Plan B, which is more commonly known as the morning after pill. And that works by stopping or delaying ovulation, that's the release of an egg, so there's no egg for the sperm to fertilize. There are some outlier cases, and this is where it gets a little confusing. In extraordinarily rare cases with IUDs, for example, an egg might possibly be fertilized and then the IUD would work to prevent that egg from implanting into the uterus and causing a pregnancy. There's also something that's also not very common, which is when a woman is concerned after having had unprotected sex and she has an IUD fitted within five days. However, a pregnancy test is done before that happens and it's frankly pretty difficult to get an appointment to get an IUD inserted that quickly.

Sara Ganim:

So is this the case where science and politics just can't seem to get along, they can't seem to agree?

Elizabeth Weise:

Yes, it is. And I talked to more than 10 medical professionals, I mean, we're talking experts in their field, who all said, "That's just not how birth control works in the vast majority of cases." And then you have politicians who are saying, "These are abortion causing." And I think it's difficult for a regular consumer to think, okay, what is actually happening? And that's why in the story, we just try to say, "Listen, here's where the egg is. Here's where the sperm is. Do they meet in the vast majority of cases?"

Sara Ganim:

You write about this confusion causing access issues. Tell me about that.

Elizabeth Weise:

So yeah, that's really interesting. So this actually does have real world effects on women because not only do we have lawmakers in states, especially states that have banned abortion, who are saying, "We don't think the state should pay for these methods of contraception." And they're very popular. I mean, up to 14% of American women have IUDs, a quarter of women of reproductive age have used the morning after pill at least once. And that's a lot of women. Birth control is legal in all 50 states and it is accessible in all 50 states. And in states, especially states where abortion is outlawed, a lot of women are getting misinformation that tells them that morning after pills are illegal in their state. And so they're not even asking for them because they think they're illegal. And there's a lot of misinformation out online, especially aimed at young women telling them that hormonal birth control is dangerous and that it's harmful, it causes abortions. And so you have a lot of women not accessing highly effective safe forms of birth control because they feel they're illegal or unavailable in their states.

Sara Ganim:

The Biden Administration is proposing some new rules under the Affordable Care Act to address this access issue. What are these new rules and do they have a chance of becoming law?

Elizabeth Weise:

So what these new rules would do would be to require that private health insurers pay for over-the-counter birth control methods, which would include emergency contraception. Now there's a 60 day comment period, which hasn't started yet. So all of this happens after the election and none of us know what's going to happen after the election. So whether or not that will become law is unknown.

Sara Ganim:

Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent for Paste BN who covers health issues. Elizabeth, thank you so much.

Elizabeth Weise:

Always a pleasure.

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Sara Ganim:

Thanks as always for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Sara Ganim filling in for Taylor Wilson who will be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.