Writer Ruben Reyes Jr. joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportation. Reyes explains how deportation could affect families or households with different immigration statuses, including those here through Deferred Action Childhood Arrival (commonly known as DACA) and with Temporary Protected Status. The three discuss Trump’s plans to involve the military in his efforts, and the difficulties he may face, given the interconnectedness of our social and economic systems. Reyes also talks about writing about the dehumanization of immigrants through science fiction and satire, and how he thinks about agency and possibility when he is portraying characters facing systemic oppression. He reads from his short story collection There is a Rio Grande in Heaven.
Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: It seems to me like the Democrats deport a lot of people, but then talk nice about it, and the Republicans are mean, and then get votes for being meaner than the Democrats. Am I completely wrong about that simplification of the issue?
Ruben Reyes Jr.: Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s what it definitely feels like. This is one of the major issues I have with the Democratic Party, is that I’m so much further left on this issue in particular. I think it’s obviously more complicated than that, and I think the really worrying thing is that Republicans like Greg Abbott and Donald Trump are threatening to make things worse, to go even further, to deport more people, but also to get rid of some basic rights, like the right to apply for asylum when you’re in the U.S. They talk about birthright citizenship; that’s an enshrined right, but they would love to get rid of it for the children of immigrants like me, it feels like. Yeah, so it’s complicated and scary.
V.V. Ganeshananthan: So Ruben, just for our listeners who might not know, can you explain what Title 42 is?
RR: Title 42 was basically a policy that the Trump administration put in place during COVID under the claims of public health issues that basically allowed the government to get immigrants, from all over, at the southern border and force them to remain in Mexico, when the general policy is that you’re allowed to enter when you’re seeking asylum and be processed and stay in the U.S. And of course, the issue was it increased the number of on-paper expulsions, and also put immigrants into really dangerous situations in these border towns that were overrun and just don’t have the infrastructure to deal with as many people as they were dealing with.
It’s really fascinating to me that in 2018 it was all about how cruel Trump was being to immigrants. By the time we hit 2020, it’s like a small part of the election, and Biden makes some promises about immigration that he doesn’t follow through on.
VVG: And I guess now we’re about to see what promises Trump is going to follow through on.
WT: Well, one of them is that he’s going to deport as many as 20 million people. Other people, including private security companies, are talking about detention facilities. All of this—aside from the moral issues here, which are important—would be very expensive. It would drive up inflation, grocery prices, and a significant portion of our agricultural labor forces are immigrants.
Trump has also said he would involve the military in these plans and will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was something he kept saying on the stump, which gives authorities broad powers to deport people identified as foreign enemies. What does that mean? Does he know what this is going to look like? Can you imagine what this would actually, in practice, look like?
RR: I don’t know if he knows. I doubt he knows. I bet he has a concept of a plan or whatever he’s been saying. I think I’m of two minds on it. I think that he’s a real threat, especially if he’s able to kind of pull back some of the legal rights and processes that immigrants and refugees have benefited from, and I think a Department of Homeland Security that’s on his side could do that.
On the other hand, I think it’s really logistically difficult to do what he’s promising, because both the lives and the systems under which immigrants live are really complicated. There’s a lot of people that are in the system somehow, and there’s a lot of people that aren’t. It’s not clear how he’s going to prioritize deportations, if he even decides to pursue them. And then there’s the question of, who’s going to do it? How’s it going to be done? I think the optimistic side of me thinks that he’s a lot of talk, and when it comes down to logistics, it could fall apart. All that said, I do think that they could build on some of the things that he did during his first term, which were really harmful and difficult to watch and read about.
VVG: But one of the things that happened the previous time was a lot of resistance from local law enforcement in sanctuary states where there were more or less people saying local law enforcement is not going to support the actions of ICE in terms of raids, detention, etc., that local law enforcement is going to resist this. I’ve seen some calls on the state level, on the local level, to resist this. Of course, that’s going to be a lot easier to do in states that are blue than in states that are red. There are more states that are red this time around.
WT: Did you hear about his proposal to vet generals and get rid of those who he thinks are insufficiently loyal? I think, and people are speculating that, yes, this is in anticipation of local law enforcement resisting deportation, so you just use the Army.
VVG: I did not hear about this because we are apparently drinking from a news sewage hose.
WT: Okay, I’m just letting you know—
VVG: I can’t keep up with the pace!
WT: —in case you were curious. Sorry, your theory doesn’t work!
VVG: A new feature of our podcast is the moment where Whitney’s like, “Hey, Sugi, do you know about this fucking awful thing?” And then everyone gets to see what it looks like when I find out!
So Trump compares himself to Eisenhower, who infamously ran a deportation plan called Operation Wetback, that being, of course, a racist slur for Mexicans, and that resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people, including some U.S. citizens, according to The Guardian. There’s so many households with mixed status in the U.S. Today I was reading a stat that said something like 70% of households where there’s an undocumented person, there’s also someone with legal status. How are people with different immigration statuses going to be affected by these plans?
RR: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, for listeners, when we talk about mixed status families, we’re generally referring to any kind of family where people have different citizenship status. So this could be a parent who’s undocumented and has a citizen child, or I know of a lot of families where there might be four siblings and some of them are citizens, some of them have DACA, some might not have any status at all. And so, yeah, I think that actually is what gets missed a lot in all this rhetoric, especially from the Trump administration.
A couple of weeks ago someone asked him: “So, how do you do mass deportations without separating families?” And his answer was, “Oh, we just deport them all together. We don’t separate the families. We deport everyone.” You can’t do that to a mixed status family. That’s not legal, setting aside the moral issues there. And so I think that’s kind of the big flaw, and one of the many flaws, in trying to take this scorched earth approach to deportation. Every single person in this country, including immigrants, including refugees, are part of a social network, and you can’t just immediately break those bonds. You can’t pull them out of their communities that easily. And I think that’s maybe the glimmer of hope in all this. All these people who we often boil down to numbers or statistics or talking points are part of communities that need them and will vouch for them.
But, back to your question a little bit. The other thing I’ll say is that the thing that I’m maybe most worried about are the most limited protections. So things that either have to be renewed by Congress or were put in by executive order, things like DACA or TPS (temporary protected status). It’s just a fraction of the people who are in the United States, but these are things that could change at a whim within the administration, and they were fought over during the last Trump administration. So I guess those are the folks that I’m maybe most worried about and curious to see what actions people will take to try protecting them, because I think there will be a sub-current of resistance, just like there was in the last Trump administration.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Ruben Reyes Jr. by Trevor Bishai.
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There is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Others:
“Trump is promising deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. What is it?” by Rachel Treisman | NPR * Stephen Miller * “Who is Usha Vance? Yale law graduate and wife of vice presidential nominee JD Vance” by Olivia Diaz |AP * Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo * “Trump’s goal of mass deportations fell short. But he has new plans for a second term” by Elliot Spagat | AP * Donald Trump TIME Interview on 2024 Transcript | Time * “In Trump’s mass deportation plan, the private prison industry sees a lucrative opportunity” by Laura Romero and Peter Charalambous | ABC News * “If Trump Wins the Election, This is What’s at Stake” by Lauren Gamibino | The Guardian * “Trump promised the ‘largest deportation’ in U.S. history. Here’s how he might start” by Steve Inskeep and Christopher Thomas | NPR