Trump’s plans for mass deportations could target 47,000 in Philadelphia: ‘No question it’s going to be ugly.’

For 20 years Blanca Pacheco has fought for immigrants in Philadelphia, becoming painfully familiar with federal operations to deport men, women, and children.

Sometimes a father disappears from the community, arrested by ICE. Other times it’s a mother with kids.

Now President-elect Donald Trump intends to dwarf anything that has come before, pledging an unprecedented removal of millions of undocumented people across the United States, beginning on his first day in office.

“We’re preparing as if everything he says is going to be real,” said Pacheco, codirector of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, an advocacy group. “We’re not in denial of how bad it could get. But we refuse to enter into panic.”

Trump has provided few details of his plan but has promised mass deportations of those who lack permission to be in the country — about 13 million people, roughly the population of Pennsylvania. That would require authorities to locate, capture, confine, feed, adjudicate, and remove several times the number of all those currently held in American jails and prisons.

Can Trump do it? Experts say it would be hard to accomplish, demanding billions in tax dollars, an unrivaled government mobilization, and a radical expansion of the nation’s deportation apparatus.

But, they say, even partial success by the administration could cause huge disruption, not only to those who would be arrested and detained, but also to the economy and American civic life as millions of neighbors, workers, and family members are sent out of the country.

An immediate local target would be the 47,000 undocumented people in Philadelphia, part of 153,000 statewide, with an additional 440,000 in New Jersey. ICE is exploring ways to increase detention capacity in the Garden State, potentially adding 600 beds in at least two facilities, and the agency’s national officers association said in a statement that removal agents “are fired up and ready to go get to work.”

“There’s no question it’s going to be ugly,” said Elizabeth Goitein, an authority on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute at New York University Law School.

Trump said he will declare a national emergency, using military assets to carry out “the largest deportation program in American history.” He has promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime authority, to put “these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

Factually, immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population. Unquestionably, Trump’s plans would surpass other big deportations reaching back more than a century.

Local people who lack legal status are worried.

“It will be bad, but I don’t know how bad it’s going to be,” said E., 24, an undocumented fast-food worker in Philadelphia, who agreed to be interviewed only if he was identified by a single initial.

He came here about a year ago, drawn by “the famous American dream,” he said, leaving an Ecuador that had become dangerous and unstable. He entered the U.S. legally and stayed when his visa expired.

His undocumented coworkers are nervous, too, at a moment when legal immigration status becomes paramount.

“They are not going to ask you, ‘Are you a good person? Are you a criminal?’’ E. said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

He has tried to make himself less visible as Trump’s inauguration nears. A couple of weeks ago, a man on the Market Street subway line began shouting how he wanted people deported, and E. began to ponder his own physical safety.

“It’s critical that immigrants know and exercise their rights,” said Hyeonock “Mel” Lee, executive director of the Worri Center, an Asian American justice organization in Lansdale. “It’s important people know there are others out there who can understand their experiences [and who] they can lean on for support and resources.”

About 11 million people — roughly 3.3% of the U.S. population — have no authority to be here. An additional 2.3 million crossed the southern border without legal status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2023 and early 2024.

More than half of Americans support kicking them out of the country, polls show, and it’s completely legal for the government to do so. Deportations take place year in and year out, under Republican and Democratic presidents, including about 145,000 last year under President Joe Biden.

But a Brookings Institution analysis said mass deportation would likely require a level of public enforcement actions to which Americans are unaccustomed, including widespread arrests in worksites, schools, and health-care facilities. It’s unclear if enough federal agents could even be hired, wrote Tara Watson, director of the institution’s Center for Economic Security and Opportunity.

An in-depth study by the nonpartisan American Immigration Council considered two scenarios:

In one, as Vice President-elect JD Vance has mentioned, the administration would try to deport one million people a year — more than double the all-time annual high. The peak was about 400,000 during the first Obama administration, and that included those who were stopped at the border and quickly removed.

That would cost about $88 billion a year, with ancillary costs bringing a 10-year total to $967.9 billion, the study said.

The other scenario is a one-time deportation operation targeting all 13 million undocumented, which would conservatively cost $315 billion, the council found. That’s more than the government spends to operate the U.S. Army.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement would need to hire 30,000 new agents and staff, instantly ranking it among the largest law enforcement agencies in the federal government.

The study predicted the U.S. economy would suffer as undocumented workers — and their labor and tax dollars — vanished. The loss in gross domestic product would be 4.2% to 6.8%, potentially more than in the Great Recession, when GDP shrank by 4.3% from 2007 to 2009, the study said.

The government would lose $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, and safety-net contributions would drop by $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. One in eight workers in the construction and agriculture industries would be deported, and hospitality trades would lose one in 14.

Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the Trump administration’s ability to deport large numbers will depend on multiple factors.

“How much money is Congress willing to give them? How aggressive are they willing to be with the National Guard, with the U.S. military?” she asked. “What if they don’t follow the rule of law? In a world where they’re active on the scale of the way they say they’re going to act, these questions are going to become very real.”

Huge expenses would flow from the need to build new deportation infrastructure, particularly detention facilities. The U.S. would need to create 24 times more beds than currently exist, establish more than 1,000 new courtrooms, hire hundreds of new immigration judges, and dramatically expand the scope of deportation flights, the council study said.

“The reality is deporting 13 million people seems like an impossibility, functionally and practicably,” said attorney Bridget Cambria, executive director of Aldea — the People’s Justice Center in Reading. “But that doesn’t mean demonstrating the power the executive branch has over immigration isn’t going to be terrible for large swaths of people.”

About 8.5 million undocumented residents live in “mixed-status” households — that is, they reside with U.S. citizens, people who have legal status, or both — according to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, which examines international migration. An estimated 4.4 million U.S.-citizen children have an undocumented parent who could be removed.

For many migrants, being arrested won’t immediately mean deportation. It could mean jail. And limbo.

For instance, Venezuelans make up about 270,000 of the undocumented population, but their homeland has no deportation agreement with the United States. Bhutan doesn’t accept deportees, nor does North Korea, nor other lands that cite costs and security risks.

“If you’re undocumented, you can be detained,” said Cambria, who worked to close the Berks Detention Center, ending family detention in Pennsylvania. “And that period of detention can be indefinite.”

Any mass deportation effort would have to be carried out amid the fierce resistance that advocates promise to mount in the streets and in the courts on behalf of immigrants.

“Many will have defenses — and relief,” said attorney Emma Tuohy, a removal specialist who is president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

She expects that the administration will increase deportations, but that mechanics and logistics will make it challenging to do so.

Immigration courts already have a backlog of 3.7 million cases, including nearly 90,000 in Pennsylvania and 220,000 in New Jersey. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found only 18% of those ordered deported in 2020 were actually expelled.

“Notwithstanding the heated rhetoric, there will be lots of barriers before anything can happen,” said Cathryn Miller-Wilson, executive director of HIAS Pennsylvania, which helps low-income immigrants and refugees.

Large deportations have been carried out before in the United States, undertaken by the federal government, local authorities, and vigilantes.

In 1917, more than 1,000 striking Arizona mine workers were kidnapped and shipped to a town near the Mexico border in the so-called Bisbee Deportation. Depression-era job fears saw 1.8 million people who were perceived as Mexican, including U.S. citizens, forced onto trains and buses and sent out. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a military-style operation that removed more than a million Mexican immigrants.

None of those deportations approached the scale of what Trump said he intends.

“I don’t see how they can do that without being really violent,” said Pacheco, of New Sanctuary Movement. “Families are sacred, and we will match our work to defend that sanctity. And we will do everything in our power to protect those families, and everything in our power to fight back.”