Sitting across from Tucker Carlson, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance looked to the future. “Mark this down,” he said. “This is going to be prophetic.” The divination from Donald Trump’s running mate: When the former president returns to the White House, “the minute we start doing anything on the deportation front,” a corporate and government cabal will “try to take him down in a very big way.”

Trump speaks frequently about his plans to launch “the largest deportations operation” in history. Earlier this month, in Aurora, Colorado, he even vowed to invoke wartime powers such as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It is one of the reasons, among many, that Democrats are working so hard to defeat him.

As Trump talks up deportation, his allies are bracing for a backlash – the kind Vance foresees, which is to say, like none other. The tumultuous reaction to his last presidency, the charge that he put “kids in cages,” said one former immigration official, “will look like a warmup.”

But with less than two weeks until Election Day, Trump hasn’t faced negative headwinds for his border hawkism. A slim majority of Americans support mass deportation, including many Latinos, have warmed to Trump despite the grim warnings from Vice President Kamala Harris about his proposals.

“We all remember what they did to tear families apart,” Harris said last month at an event hosted by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “And now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history.” Harris warned that a second Trump term would be more extreme than the first.

“Imagine what that would look like and what that would be,” Harris said of deportations. “How’s that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”

And while exact details can be hazy, the promises from Trump are always in the superlative. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told RealClearPolitics that the Republican would not only restore past policies but “implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”

Voters seem........

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