President-elect Donald Trump posted Jan. 14 on his Truth Social account his hearty approval of the Proclamation issued by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordering preparations for quick implementation of plans to “deport illegal aliens” after Trump takes office. “Thank you Ron, hopefully other Governors will follow!” Trump commented.
DeSantis’s Proclamation calls on all Florida state and local officials to prepare to secure the resources and funding required to implement these plans. DeSantis announced that he has called a special session of the state legislature for Jan. 27, one week after Trump is inaugurated, “to appropriate funding detention, relocation, transportation infrastructure, local law enforcement support, and everything else needed for Florida to carry out this mission.”
According to the Pew Research Center, there were 1.2 million undocumented immigrants living in Florida in 2022, who made up 8% of its labor force. The number is believed to have grown since then.
Consider the scale of disruption of Florida’s economy and civic life involved. Is every law enforcement officer in Florida to be taken off fighting crime to hunt down illegals? The National Guard called out? Where will the resources be redeployed from for this operation? Will the state pay for this? Will the federal government? How will the people, once detained, be sent and to where? To an impoverished neighboring country from which thousands of people are already fleeing because the conditions make it impossible to survive? Send them back to the waiting arms of Dope, Inc.’s traffickers? How will the United States deal with the wave of anger and ill-will against the United States that will sweep the United States’s southern neighbors who see hundreds of thousands of their people “dumped” like cattle?
The migrant crisis can be resolved. The Schiller Institute outlined the only possible strategy to permanently end this crisis, humanely, in its pamphlet, “Development Drive Means Billions of New Jobs, No Refugees, No War.”
