Timothy Snyder's Warning
Trump's Mass Deportation Plan Will Be Violent, And It Will Involve Everyone, Including You
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder has a warning for us.
But first, consider the economic costs of Trump’s mass deportation plan.
Now, listen to the warning (a 10-minute audio.) Here is his preface: “As a historian of forced population movements and as an American, I don’t think we are taking the consequences of the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. The reality will be much more personal and awful, and the politics more transformative and durable, than we might think.”
If you prefer to read rather than listen, here is a rough transcript:
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“My name is Timothy Snyder and I'm a historian. I've worked for decades and I've written some books about mass deportations. I wanted to share some thoughts about the Trump-Vance plan to deport at least 10 million human beings from the United States. I have this feeling that we're not taking this seriously enough. And I thought these thoughts that I'm about to share might be helpful.
The first thing that I would ask you to keep in mind is that these big numbers, whether it's 10 million or 11 million or 20 million, these big numbers describe people. They describe individuals that you have to think of 10 million as being 10 million times one. That each deportation is going to involve an individual human being. Each one will involve a tawdry, violent situation that's specific to the people involved, not just the person who's being deported, but the person who's doing the deporting, the people who are doing the deporting, and also those who inform, everybody who's involved. Ten million individual situations.
The second thing that I'd like you to think about is that if we have 10 million deportations in the United States, we're looking at a climate of violence all the time on a micro scale to level of households, apartment buildings, but also on a macro scale. This will mean violence all over the country, violence that you see, violence that you don't see, violence that you hear about, violence that you worry about.
The third thing I wanted to say is that this will involve people you know. I think a lot of folks imagine that, well, I'm not from Latin America myself, or I am from Latin America, or my family's from Latin America, but this is going to involve other people. It's going to involve people you know. It's going to involve the folks who are in mixed families. 20 million Americans are in mixed families where some people are documented and some people are not. It's going to involve the people who you think are documented but turn out not to be documented. It's going to involve the people who themselves think they're documented but turn out not to be documented. But it will be people you know. If not somebody you know well, it's going to be your son's girlfriend, or it's going to be a friend of a friend, it's going to be a colleague, co-worker. It'll be somebody you know. With these kinds of numbers, it's going to be somebody you know.
The fourth thing is as I suggested just a moment ago, this will definitely separate families. It has to separate families. It will separate children from parents. There are about 20 million Americans, as I said, who live in mixed families. When people who are undocumented are deported, that's going to leave children behind. It's going to break families with all of the sadness that that involves for the individuals, but also all of the instability and woe that that brings to the country as a whole.
The fifth thing, even if you are undocumented, even if you are a citizen, you've got to remember that on this scale, there will be mistakes. There are always mistakes. In mass deportation programs like this, you can't expect that the government's going to be absolutely perfect. It never is. There will be US citizens who are deported. If you imagine that the government only makes a mistake on the scale of 5%, if you look at 5% of 10 million people who are deported, you're looking at 500,000 people. That's a lot of people. So even if you think it's smaller than that, imagine you think it's just... one percent, that's still a hundred thousand American citizens who are going to be deported, and one of them could be you. One of them could be you.
The sixth thing that I want to bring in, this is a slightly different point, is that you have to imagine that if the United States is going to deport 10 million people or more, this is going to involve tens of thousands of enforcers and Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are directly involved. It means that if you're a police officer, if you're a highway patrolman, you're going to get involved in this. You're going to have to be involved in this because there's no way the federal government can do it on its own. Anybody who serves any kind of policing function in this country is going to have to be involved in one way or another. And if you happen to be from the Latino community, it's much more likely that you're going to be asked to become involved. And of course, a side effect of this is that if we have all of the folks who work in police involved in deportation, crime will increase because the policemen are going to be off doing something else. Policemen, policewomen.
Seventh point, and again, this has to do with a larger society. If we are in a situation where we're going to try to remove, and I'm saying we advisedly because in a certain way everybody has to get involved. If we're going to get into a situation where 10 million people are going to be deported from the U.S., that's going to create a culture of denunciation. It has to. The federal government will have to ask people to denounce their neighbors because that's the only way they're going to find these 10 million people, which means that we will all be living in a culture of denunciation. Whether or not you were documented or not, if you come from a Latino family, you're going to be denounced, or there's a very good chance you're going to be denounced, and you're going to have to worry about who is going to denounce you. And even if you are documented and you stay in the country, the denunciation itself is going to be a very unpleasant procedure, and it's going to become completely normal. And it's going to ruin people. I mean, it changes the culture completely when people who have some kind of a grudge think that they can, if not deport their neighbor, they can at least cause their neighbor trouble by denouncing them. And if you're afraid of denunciation, then of course you're going to have to try to live your life in a completely different way, a much more repressed way.
The eighth thing, and then this now speaks particularly to people who are from Latino, Latina, communities, you're going to be divided because the federal government is going to expect you to cooperate, to find folks who are not documented, you are going to be expected to cooperate more than others because the federal government is going to expect you to know who these people are and where they live. And this means that your communities will be divided because some people will cooperate and other people won't, and there will be strife about this. If you are in any sense a local leader, you will be expected to help. So if you're a mayor, if you're a city council member, if you're a leading businessman, businesswoman, you're going to be expected to help to find undocumented people. Your life is going to change in this way. And you either will or you won't, but you're going to be faced with a choice which either way is going to make your life worse than it is now.
Ninth point, there will be resistance, and this is an intended consequence. If the federal government tries to deport 10 million people, some of those 10 million people are going to run. Some of those 10 million people are not going to go along. And those acts of resistance will then be used by the federal government or by local authorities or by racists who are just American citizens. Those acts of resistance will be used to generate hate and repression against communities, against whole communities. And I think it's important just to notice this. We don't want this to be true, but it is. This is the point. It's the point.
The point of these deportations is to generate, and this is my tenth point, the point of these deportations is to create a politics of us and them. It's to turn some Americans against other Americans. That is the whole idea. You shouldn't imagine that somehow these deportations will happen quickly and cleanly and they'll all be over. They won't be quick, they won't be complete, and they will never be over. And the ultimate political purpose of them is to create a situation where if you are Latino, Other people are going to be against you and you're going to be the target of politics. You're going to be the target of violence because that is the way this whole political system is going to be changed. That is the purpose of something like this.
So I tried to start at the beginning with thinking about each individual issue. not just the big numbers, but each individual. And I wanted to bring this to a close with the idea that it's going to end up affecting everyone. The change in political atmosphere, the denunciations, and ultimately the politics of us and them will affect everyone. It will change the country dramatically and for the worse. I'm Timothy Snyder. I'm a historian. I will write this up on my Substack at some point soon, but this has been on my mind and I wanted to share it in this way. If you've listened to this, please feel free to share it with whomever you think needs to hear it. Thank you very much.”
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Coda: Please read (or re-read) Us and Them: The Science of Identity (original title, “Understanding Your Tribal Mind”) by David Berreby (2008, Univ. of Chicago Press).
