James is preparing himself for the home stretch of the election campaign by unplugging and plunging into a lake somewhere in Pennsylvania (I think), so this week’s newsletter has a different author. Here at Economist HQ we have been thinking about mass deportations, a phrase that has gone from insult to slogan. At the RNC in Milwaukee people waved “MASS DEPORTATION” campaign signs. Donald Trump has taken to promising the biggest deportation programme in American history. Our colleague Aryn Braun went to Texas, where she spent time in an immigration detention centre and an immigration court, with the aim of working out how many people Mr Trump could actually deport if he really wanted to. That piece is here, accompanied by a leader.

There’s a chart in Aryn’s piece that shows what’s been happening with deportations over the past 30 years. 

A removal (dark red) is when the federal government arrests someone, puts them in an immigration detention centre or jail and then puts them on a plane or a bus back to their home country. Removals peaked under Barack Obama’s presidency. A return is when someone who is in the United States is told to go back and does so. Returns were much higher in the 1990s and 2000s, when most migrants were Mexicans crossing the southern border. In recent years, many more migrants have come from Central America, or farther afield, which makes returning them harder.

You will hear a lot of competing claims about these numbers in the election campaign, but you can see from the chart that, taken together, removals and returns were higher in the last fiscal year (2023) than at any point under Mr Trump’s presidency. The grey bar confuses the story, though. These are “Title 42 expulsions”.

Title 42 is a public-health law that allows migrants to be expelled without due process when the federal government is worried about the spread of infectious diseases, like covid-19. Those numbers are so high because Title 42 was used to return people who had just crossed the border illegally. Many of them tried to cross multiple times, and so were returned under Title 42 multiple times. The Harris campaign could use these Title 42 numbers to claim that the current administration has been far tougher than the Trump administration, but that would be misleading. 

Editing the story and writing the leader also got me thinking about how often it seems things can’t go on like this—and how usually they can. Ten years ago I too went to an immigration detention centre and an immigration court in Texas to write a story called “The great expulsion”. All the pathologies of America’s immigration system were on display then. If anything it’s even worse now, as the judge Aryn quoted suggests. He currently has 23,000 immigration cases pending in his court.

While I have you, please do read and share this head-spinning story about bitcoin in Texas. Have a wonderful Labour Day weekend. James will be back next week.

Thanks for reading Checks and Balance. If you have any questions about this newsletter, or future topic ideas, you can send us an email at checksandbalance@economist.com.  

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