Rolling Stone reports:

Donald Trump is coming back into office this month on a vow to initiate the “largest” mass deportation operation in American history, and says he plans to unleash the U.S. military to help him do it. But according to three sources familiar with internal policy discussions in Trump’s circle, the president-elect and several of his key lieutenants are aware that their desired, larger-scale crackdowns — which could involve a new network of militarized “camps” — will take significant time to execute.

In the meantime, Trump and his incoming anti-immigration crew have plans to fill the gaps in part by leaning heavily into generating relentless propaganda and (as one Trump transition official puts it) “media spectacle” that many of them hope will cause undocumented immigrants to flee the country and persuade migrants not to come to America.

The racist terror campaign that Team Trump unleashed on the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, will likely serve as a model for what the Trump White House has in store for immigrants across America. And it’s a model that pro-immigration attorneys and nonprofit organizations are getting ready to combat, to counter such a widespread “media spectacle” and potential onrush of misinformation that could very well do some of Trump’s immigration-crackdown work for him.

For weeks, Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan and other advisers to the president-elect have been telling anyone who will listen that the start of the new administration will feature a “shock and awe” show of force regarding migrants and undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration is, of course, preparing to begin by imposing, re-imposing, and doing things that the Biden administration is not. However, much of what the country is likely to see take place during the dawn of the second Trump presidency will look an awful lot like the implementation of policies or practices that are currently in place.

For instance, under Joe Biden and other presidents, ICE has already been conducting arrests of undocumented individuals charged or accused of violent crimes in blue states and sanctuary cities controlled by Democrats. Such arrests are generally uncontroversial, given that few liberals actually oppose such arrests. You can find evidence of such arrests in the news, or in standard Biden administration press releases.

The difference is: President Biden is typically not going out in public and bellowing about how “tough” he is — and how these arrests should serve as a warning to the millions of undocumented immigrants in America, their families, those with legal protected status, and anyone else who may feel compelled to make a similar journey to the United States. Trump, on the other hand, will not be coy about wielding that propaganda bullhorn, even if it’s to highlight arrests or raids that are barely any different than what is already standard operating procedure.

According to the three sources, there have been recent internal discussions within Trump’s government-in-waiting, including with the president-elect himself, not only about launching high-profile, big-city raids at the very beginning of the second term — but about how to inject those raids into the media ecosystem and social-media bloodstream as aggressively as possible. [Continue reading…]