A Chilling Look at What Trump’s Deportation Ideas Would Really Mean

August 23, 2016 / FWD. us

“You deported me.”

Donald Trump has talked about “rounding people up humanely” with a “deportation force” – but what would this kind of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants really mean?

The truth is that we don’t have to guess – we’ve seen it before. This video will take you through history and the hypothetical scenario of what anti-immigration people want today, to show the harrowing financial and social cost of a plan like Trump’s.

In this part of FWD.us’s six-part “11 Million Stories” series illustrating life as an undocumented immigrant, Michelle Yoon tells the story. She told NBC that she wanted to participate in this series to give visibility to undocumented AAPI immigrants.

We’re glad she did, and we hope this helps makes clear why we can’t go down this path.

With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism

Click for the Transcript

11 Million Stories: Michelle, The Truth of Mass Deportation Transcription

(Title Card: IMMIGRATIONVOTER. 11 Million Stories: A Six Part Series)

Interviewer: You’re rounding them all up?

Donald Trump: We’re rounding them all up in a very humane way, in a very nice way.

Ted Cruz: I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization.

Rick Santorum: We would go through the process of contacting them and moving forward with their removal. The same thing would happen with other people who are in this country. We would move forward with removals.

Donald Trump: You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely.

(Title Card: What would deporting 11.3 million people do to America? Cost us over 600 billion dollars. Destroy millions of families. Create a police state. Imagine…)

(Michelle: Student at UCLA, lived in the U.S. 14 years)

Michelle: You deported me.

The American Revolution made me fall in love with history. I became obsessed with stories. Everything I read taught me of what was going on around me. It made me excited to be here, alive, at this moment.

But then mass deportation started and everything changed. I stopped leaving my house. I stayed inside because I was afraid that they would find me, afraid that they would take me away from my family. So to find comfort, I dug into our history. I was looking for something, anything that would help.

I couldn’t believe that the military’s branch of ICE was used before. During The Great Depression, 500,000 to a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pushed out of the United States.

And then The Trail of Tears. President Andrew Jackson implemented The Indian Removal Act. He forced the Cherokee Nation out of their home.

In 1942, President Roosevelt created Japanese internment camps. He detained 120,000 Japanese people, most which were U.S. citizens.

(Title Card: Mass deportation would be 100x as many people as went into internment camps.)

History tells us that the forced migration of a large group of people has always had devastating effects on the United States. It has always been a mistake.

Let’s not make the same mistake a fourth time.

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