NOTUS reports:

Former President Donald Trump is promising “mass deportation” — and Republicans in Congress have been quick to support the promise, even if they’re unsure how such an effort would work.

“You’ll have to ask the president,” Sen. Ron Johnson said when NOTUS asked last week what that sort of deportation policy would look like.

When NOTUS asked Rep. Troy Nehls a similar question — how the government would go about getting a large number of undocumented people out of the country — the Texas Republican provided a simple answer: “One at a time.”

The idea of a “mass deportation” is difficult to pin down. It’s become a rallying cry on the right, but getting details into how the government would potentially deport tens of millions of people is much more difficult. Whether or not it’s realistic depends largely on how people interpret the meaning.

“There’s all these comments on, mass deportation is gonna be, you know, grabbing all these people who are still in their legal process,” Sen. James Lankford told NOTUS. “That’s not gonna happen because, again, a court’s gonna stop it, and the Trump administration has been through this before. They know it.”

“No one really knows what it looks like,” Lankford added. “I just know what a court would stop and what a court wouldn’t stop.”

And yet, because no one knows what it would look like, it’s been easy for Trump allies to endorse the idea without having to address some of the more brutal details, like family separation policies. The lack of details has also allowed immigration advocates to paint a scary picture.

They ask how the government could go about finding undocumented people and figuring out if they’re in the country legally without a huge increase in law enforcement, without the need to prove citizenship for everyday activities and without using data and surveillance to peer into the lives of Americans. [Continue reading…]