Trump’s promised mass deportations loom large in Arizona’s border towns

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To get to the U.S.-Mexico border through the Arizona community of Nogales, one passes residential neighbourhoods of distinctive, southwestern architecture – homes with low-pitched roofs, adobe bricks and stucco exteriors. Thrift stores and auto-body shops display mostly Spanish-language signage and the city’s many art galleries and cultural celebrations reflect that the population of 20,000 is almost entirely Hispanic.

The sleepy atmosphere in this tight-knit community about 110 kilometres south of Tucson stands in stark contrast to the divide at the city’s edge. At the border wall separating it from Mexico are coils of razor wire – six rows high, covering the entirety of the 20-foot wall at some stretches – installed by the U.S. military during Donald Trump’s first presidency to ward off what he described in 2018 as an “invasion” by a migrant caravan from Central America.

Communities like Nogales are again in the spotlight with Mr. Trump’s re-election, and his new promise to carry out what would be the largest deportation operation in American history beginning on Day 1 of his return to office.

That pledge, which is also documented in the 2024 Republican platform, has raised concerns among immigrant-advocacy groups, human-rights organizations and policy analysts about the potential impact that even a partial implementation could have on families, the economy and the very fabric of the nation. Canada is already bracing for an influx of migrants from the U.S. as a result.

The issue is a potent one in Arizona, which shares a roughly 600-kilometre border with Mexico and is home to about 264,600 undocumented immigrants, or about 3.6 per cent of the state’s population, according to the American Immigration Council, a non-profit advocacy group. Locals are deeply divided over how best to integrate this population, balancing the significant cultural and economic contributions they make with long-standing concerns over border security.

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Along with Mr. Trump’s election, Arizonans on Tuesday voted in favour of a ballot measure that would give state law enforcement and judges powers to arrest and deport non-citizens entering at locations other than official ports.

In an April interview with Time magazine, the president-elect said his administration “will be using local law enforcement” for his deportation operation and suggested that there would be incentives for participating departments.

“Well, there’s a possibility that some [police departments] won’t want to participate, and they won’t partake in the riches, you know,” he told the magazine. He also said he would use the National Guard and other arms of the military.

But there remains widespread concern over whether such actions are feasible – or even legal.

In Santa Cruz County, which includes Nogales, Sheriff David Hathaway recalled Arizona’s 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighbours Act, also known as SB 1070, which required immigrants to carry immigration documents and empowered local law enforcement to investigate and detain those suspected to be in violation, including at traffic stops.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), argued that it led to racial profiling. In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down several provisions of the law on the grounds that it was the role of the federal government, and not states, to set immigration policy.

“Our demographic in Nogales is 95-per-cent Hispanic,” Mr. Hathaway said in an interview. “If I’m going to be going out there checking documents of everybody just because they speak Spanish, or they have a Hispanic last name, like Martinez, Hernandez, Rodriguez, or they have Hispanic physical characteristics, it would create a lot of animosity in the community. It would be ridiculous and un-American.”

Now-former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, who disobeyed a 2011 court order to stop racially profiling and detaining innocent Latinos in his crusade against illegal immigration, was convicted of criminal contempt.

“That would be a predictable result of this,” Mr. Hathaway said. Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Arpaio, calling him a patriot.

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Reyna Montoya, founder of Aliento, a youth-led group based in Phoenix that advocates for undocumented and mixed-immigration-status families, said that her organization is thinking of those groups and communities that may be torn apart by Mr. Trump’s deportation plan and the passing of the local ballot measure.

“Sadly, in Arizona, we don’t have to imagine how mass deportations will occur,” she said in a statement. “During the SB 1070 years and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, we saw police officers conducting immigration checkpoints outside of schools and churches. Nurses and doctors were forced to question patients’ immigration status.”

The ACLU has vowed to defend against the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan and work with local jurisdictions to shield residents and state resources from what it called draconian policies.

The non-partisan American Immigration Council estimates that there are more than 13 million undocumented residents in the U.S. who face the possibility of removal. It calculated that the cost of a one-time mass-deportation operation would top US$315-billion, which it called a highly conservative estimate and a practical impossibility because there is no way to do this without mass detention as an interim step.

However, a longer-term operation aiming to arrest, detain, process and deport one million people a year would average out to US$88-billion annually, for a total cost of about US$968-billion over the course of more than a decade, the council says.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at consultancy RSM, said forced deportations in large numbers would likely result in a shortage of workers in construction, agriculture, leisure, hospitality, health care and manufacturing, and affect broad swaths of the U.S. economy.

“Essentially, if they remove labour from the U.S. economy with an unemployment rate currently at 4.1 per cent – that’s already tight – you create the conditions for decline in unemployment, rising wages and a possible wage-price spiral, if it was sustained over time,” he said.

A July, 2024, report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid US$96.7-billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. Most of that, US$59.4-billion, was paid to the federal government, while the remaining US$37.3-billion was paid to state and local governments, the non-profit think tank found.