“Mass Deportations, Again?”

When 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared that solving the “illegal alien” problem could be done by making it uncomfortable for people here illegally – so they would “self-deport,” he lost the election.
“Self-deport” was so destructive that Romney easily lost to the most vulnerable presidential incumbent since President Carter. Self-deportation was not an original Romney idea. It came from Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, who moonlights at the Immigration Law Institute, the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Kobach and FAIR have authored legislation to rid the United States of people illegally here.
FAIR was founded by John Tanton who came out of Planned Parenthood and Zero Population Growth. He also founded myriad anti-immigration organizations (NumbersUSA, Center for Immigration Studies, U.S. English). He even tried to take over the Sierra Club to transform it from conservation to anti-immigration shock troops.
Kobach, an aide to former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft, is a Yale-educated Republican who has been behind the failed anti-illegal immigrant legislation in recent years. From the local level (Hazelton, PA) to the infamous Arizona attempt at legal trashing of the United State Constitution with its Senate Bill 1070 that the United States Supreme Court eviscerated, Kris Kobach was the author.  When a tsunami of criticism swamped “self-deport” candidate Romney, Kobach was dumped by Romney who had briefly looked to him for advice. He has not surfaced since.
His ideas have survived, however. They have been inserted into the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. In general, the Trump position is exponentially larger than what Romney fumbled four years ago; Trump demands 100 percent deportation of all people here illegally AND any United States citizen children they might have. This demand carries a Kobach touch in the form of very thin legal cover. It is also not new.
Mass deportations of Mexican-looking people occurred in communities throughout California and Texas in the 1930s. A recent Associated Press feature article by Russell Contreras retold the forgotten story how the U.S. government with the local police in Los Angeles rounded up and deported Mexican-looking men on the streets, on farms, in factories, wherever (http://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/Trump-s-deportation-idea-similar-to-1930s-mass-6474344.php).
They were taken to LA’s famous Union station, loaded into box and cattle cars and whisked 150 miles south to the Mexican border. There they were forced at gunpoint into Mexico, for some, a place they had never been.
The excuse was that Mexicans were taking jobs away from good American white men. That, of course, was fallacious as the world–wide depression caused American jobs to disappear not Mexican workers. Interestingly, GOP candidate Donald Trump is advocating what President Herbert Hoover tried in 1930 – i.e. Hoover imposed Smoot-Hawley steep tariffs designed, he thought, to save American jobs. Unemployment hit 25 percent after the world turned its back on U.S. trade and imposed tariffs of their own on U.S. products.
Like Hoover, Trump advocates huge tariffs on Mexico and China to “bring back jobs” those countries have “ripped off” from the United States. Example: Jobs lost such as bank tellers and “bookkeepers” who have been replaced by machines, etc. Back to mass deportation.
The Pew Research Center estimates about 11.5 million illegally present people in the country. It further estimates that 40 percent came in legally and overstayed visas. That means about 6.9 million came across the border without “inspection.”
The Trump mass deportation, however, is not based on Pew Center numbers. Trump stretches the number to 20 million-plus without any evidence except for some decade-old guesswork by a pair of “genius” analysts from the long-bankrupt Bear Stearns Wall Street firm.
“They gotta go” declares candidate Trump. He does not say how. He is a “Big Government” guy. So, will he hire and “manage” ten thousand new Border Agents, or will he try using the United States Army?
In the Bloomberg View we read: “The pro-immigration (and conservative) American Action Forum…reported that a combination of forcible and voluntary deportation would cost $420 to $619 billion over 20 years. Meanwhile, real gross domestic product would decline by 5.7 percent, or almost $1.6 trillion.”
When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly asked Trump if he would use the U.S. Army to knock down barrio doors and round up families including their U.S. citizen children for deportation, Trump didn’t answer.
Kris Kobach’s advice probably would be “use the Army.” It is illegal (since the 1878 Posse Comitatus Law) for the U.S. Army to enforce civilian laws. Of course, it was illegal in 1942 when it was used to round-up and incarcerate Japanese citizens and their American children by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kobach would quote that use of the Army as legal “precedent.”
There are exceptions to the “law,” of course. President Eisenhower used Army troops to integrate Little Rock schools and President Bush (41) used U.S. Marines in 1992 to quell race riots in Los Angeles. Do American citizen children of an illegally present mother qualify as an exception to the Posse Comitatus Law?

Contreras reported on the Los Angeles Riot of 1992 in Reason Magazine, August-September 1992 issue