Who will explain to the explainers?

How Ethnically Cleansed Could They Make America's Ethnic Cleansing, Really?

THE WORST THING WE READ™

DONALD TRUMP HAS promised to deport every undocumented immigrant in America if he's elected president. It is one of the central points of his 2024 campaign. Even though he avoided answering a direct question about it in the debate, and he got interrupted by getting shot while he talked about migrants this past Saturday, he's solidly on the record about it: the Republican Party platform promises "THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY," and Trump told Time in an interview that he would use the military to pursue "15 million and maybe as many as 20 million" people. 

That's considerably greater than the estimated 10.5 million or 11 million people living in the United States as unauthorized immigrants. But Trump isn't offering up a precisely crafted policy program. He's promising a sweeping authoritarian gesture, an exercise in state power to match his campaign rhetoric about the migrant menace. The goal is violent catharsis. 

Yet the New York Times set aside the serious, brutal ethnonationalism and assigned an immigration reporter to address it literally, as a practical problem of governance. It published the results under the headline "What Would It Take to Deport Millions of Immigrants? The Obstacles, Explained." 

By the Times' reckoning, there shouldn't be much to worry about: 

The consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic, and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.