Will President-elect Donald Trump's promise to “launch the largest deportation program in American history” really keep millions of immigrants out of the country? My research on deportees over the past five years suggests this will not be the case.
Here's why: They will come back.
One of the migrants I interviewed was deported to a dangerous city in northern Mexico, where he found himself in immediate danger when he arrived at a bus station. Members of a criminal organization demanded that he provide one password – a password he didn't have – or he was threatened with kidnapping. Ultimately, he borrowed $1,500 from a friend to pay off the debt, remain free and return to the United States.
His experience is an example of the risks that deportees face in their countries of origin. These dangers — and the relative safety of the only homes they have — often motivate them to make harrowing journeys back to the United States.
Although data on deportees is rather limited, the evidence we have shows that people re-immigrate after deportation more often than many might expect. In the 2020 financial year, for example, the federal government made a classification 40% of deportations as “reinstatement of deportation,” meaning that the deportees had re-entered the United States after being deported or ordered to leave. A 2019 report The American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, also found that such deportation reinstatements generally account for 40% of annual deportations. From 2011 to 2020, around 1.3 million deportations affected people who had previously been deported.
Because deportation policies are, at best, blunt instruments that have little regard for the lives they trap. Those who view mass deportations as a solution to unauthorized immigration ignore the deep roots, sense of belonging, family ties and determination that drive people back to the country they call home.
The people I interviewed are undeterred by deportation and have found ways to return to the United States with or without permission. Their stories reveal the rarely discussed truth that deportation does not necessarily mean the end of migration; it is often a temporary, futile interruption.
I spoke with another man who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, served in the military, and struggled with post-traumatic stress. He was deported to a country he barely remembered for a minor cannabis possession charge. In 2021, more than a decade after his exile, he returned to the only country he considers his own, the United States.
“You can travel the world,” he told me, “but eventually your heart and your mind will call you home.”
Another Mexican-born, U.S.-raised military veteran I interviewed was also deported on a marijuana charge. He felt “wiped from existence” and risked his life to return less than a month later.
“I don’t need a paper telling me I’m an American,” he told me.
These stories reveal a fundamental flaw in mass deportation. Unlike the cyclical migration patterns of previous decades—when migrants, mostly men, moved between the United States and Mexico with relative ease in response to the labor market, today's cycle is governed by government coercion and unbreakable bonds. Forced deportations inevitably lead to returns because those deported are drawn back through connections that no amount of enforcement action can resolve.
The coyotes they smuggle have become part of what anthropologist Jason De León calls a “border security industrial complex.” If their illegal operations were publicly traded, their stocks would skyrocket upon renewed demand. Meanwhile, border patrol policies push migrants into treacherous terrain where they face dehydration, hypothermia and death in the desert.
For deportees, returning is not only an act of determination, but also of survival. Some are lucky enough to make it back, but as the Spanish saying goes: “The jug goes into the water until it breaks“: The jug goes to the well until it finally breaks. Deportation policies force people to take ever greater risks to return to the only homes they have ever known. The next attempt could always be their last.
If we continue on this punitive path, deportation could become the defining issue of our time. What happens if mass deportations fail? Will we see modern versions of Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order authorizing the forced deportation and detention of Japanese Americans, including “relocation centers”?
Under a very different executive order signed by President Biden in 2021, the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs have prioritized the return of deported US military personnel and their families. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, also aimed to recognize longtime residents' ties to the country and restore their place in the American communities they call home.
Such policies live up to American ideals of justice and inclusion by including those who already belong. A mass deportation would betray these values, endanger even more lives and very often fail in itself.
Saúl Ramírez is a Fellow of Harvard Law School and a doctoral student in sociology at Harvard.