President Joe Biden’s campaign responded Saturday to a bombshell New York Times report detailing former president and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s proposed radical plans for immigration policy should he be re-elected in 2024. The campaign criticized Trump’s policy ambitions—which the Times reported would amount to an “assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history”—as “cruel and extreme.”
“Mass detention camps, attempts to deny children born here citizenship, uprooting families with mass deportations — this is the horrifying reality that awaits the American people if Donald Trump is allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa in a statement. “These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election.”
The NYT report, which drew on conversations with several close Trump advisors—including Stephen Miller, the architect of draconian immigration policies during Trump’s first term and an expected senior official in a future administration—revealed the ambitions of the nation’s 45th president to crack down spectacularly on immigration have only grown since leaving office.
“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller vowed.
If re-elected, according to Miller, Trump would reinstate a version of the Muslim ban, which Biden reversed soon after assuming the presidency. He would revive the use of the emergency powers law known as Title 42, which allowed the U.S. to deny migrants the right to seek asylum on public health grounds. Trump would attempt to end DACA, which protects children who were brought to the U.S. illegally, as well as birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to children born to undocumented parents.
A second Trump administration would seek to deport millions of undocumented immigrants every year with the help of federal troops, the Times reported. Perhaps most shocking, Trump’s plan is to detain undocumented immigrants in large camps as they wait to be deported. Miller said the camps would be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”
Many of the proposals detailed in the Times reporting would face significant financial, logistical, and, perhaps most importantly, legal hurdles. But Trump has the presumed advantage of a Supreme Court and federal appellate judiciary stacked with conservative judges he appointed during his first term, when federal courts stymied several of his immigration policies. The former president, moreover, is planning on redirecting money in the military budget toward deportations to circumvent congressional approval, Miller said.
And the sheer scale of the proposed changes—which Miller described as a “blitz”—is designed to overwhelm legal challenges. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening,” Miller said.
The Times report comes as Trump continues to escalate his anti-immigrant rhetoric. “We’ll stop the invasion on our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” the former president said during a Veterans Day rally on Saturday in New Hampshire. During the speech, Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
