Opinion | Trump's immigration team is built for horrific success

President-elect Donald Trump has been busy all week rolling out the members of his incoming administration . There are three names that stand out for how effective his choices are likely to be in their mission: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement head Tom Homan for "border czar" and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller for White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.

Even as the rest of the administration may bumble about and clash with one another, that might not be the case when it comes to enforcing Trump's dark immigration plan. Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be distressingly effective at working together. The only limit they will likely face is how much the public will allow to be carried out in its name.

In his new dual role, Miller will set the overall contours of American immigration policy . Homan will likely be charged with figuring out the operational details of Miller's plans. And Noem will be tasked with implementing those policies and carrying out Trump's promised deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

One of the few holdovers from the early Trump days, Miller was a speechwriter and senior counselor under Trump in his first term. By the end of Trump's term, he held tremendous sway over immigration policy and had helped purge the ranks of officials he deemed not aggressive enough in deterring border crossings. He helped shape many of the harshest immigration policies Trump implemented, including the so-called Muslim travel ban and the use of Title 42 to shut down the border entirely.

His main skill has always been taking Trump's worst impulses about immigrants and making them almost palpable for moderate listeners. But given a title to match his ambitions and a direct line to Trump, he'll have little to prevent him from being as extreme as he'd always hoped. Among the plans that Miller is spearheading are mass deportation camps to hold those collected in ICE workplace sweeps while being processed for expulsion and reinstating Title 42 at the border.

Aside from cracking down on undocumented immigrants, he has his sights on limiting immigration, as well. Miller has supported an end to birthright citizenship and pledged to "turbocharge" his efforts to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. He has also prepared to end parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua and let Temporary Protected Status protections expire for more than 800,000 people .

While Miller forms the plans, it will likely be Homan working to coordinate carrying them out. Trump has indicated he'd like to see the military take part in the forced removal plans, which would require Pentagon buy-in and a likely transfer of money from defense programs to pay for a surge in detention facilities . There will be legal challenges that the Justice Department will have to defend against. Homan would be the point person making sure everyone is staying on the same page.

It's worth noting that Homan's job, such as it is, exists only as two words on paper right now, as there is no "border czar" job title in the federal system and no pool of resources for him to tap. It's also fun to remember that he was promised, but never granted, a similar role in the first Trump administration. But Homan has the experience needed to carry out Miller's wishes. He was hired to head ICE's deportation arm before eventually becoming its director and implemented Trump's "zero tolerance" child separation policy .

Meanwhile, Noem's ascension is testament to how much all politics is national now. Leading South Dakota has given her little contact with the immigration system. According to the Migration Policy Institute , as of 2022 only 3.5% of the state's population was foreign-born, far less than many parts of the country. But Noem has been extremely vocal about the supposed "invasion" taking place at the southern border, enthusiastically embracing Trump's narrative and pulling stunts like deploying National Guard members to the Texas-Mexico border.

She would also be the only one of the three with any legal authority to carry out these deportation plans — or the money from Congress to do so. Immigration policy will be entirely top down with Noem in place, passing from Miller to Homan to Noem's orders to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to carry them out. It doesn't matter if she herself doesn't have any policy experience, not so long as she's willing to be a figurehead for the White House and Senate Republicans are willing to confirm her.

There are still logistical problems that would have to be overcome should Miller's deportation plan come to fruition. Homan said this week that he'd double the ICE presence in sanctuary cities like New York if needed, but ICE is already finding itself shorthanded. There's also a shortage of immigration judges, whose courts face a massive backlog of cases. But that all supposes that there's any interest from the administration in being efficient or precise in the process of forcibly removing millions from their homes.

Let's not forget that the family separation policy was a humanitarian disaster. The conditions that families were held in were terrible, surpassed in the lack of care shown only by the failure of recordkeeping by the administration. DHS said in a report this year that there are still 1,360 children "without confirmed reunifications" with their families. We could call it incompetent if the goal had been to provide humane shelter for migrants being detained or speed their processing through the immigration system. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was to make other migrants too afraid to cross the border.

Similarly, in this case, the goal isn't to be efficient or precise. Miller is likely unconcerned about how long people might have to wait in hastily built camps before being deported. The odds seem high that there will be citizens who are rounded up and forced to prove their right to stay in the country. Homan has suggested avoiding family separations by deporting whole families , problematically hinting that children born in America would be illegally expelled, as well.

There is no way to carry out the kind of operation that Miller and his associates have in mind ethically or humanely — and so they won't try to do so. In practice it will more likely be a deliberately cruel assault on human rights and dignity. But mass deportation doesn't have to be done well to make Trump's vision a reality. It just needs to be done.