Grab a book instead of my phone had been my mantra since November 5 as I sought to protect myself from the despair of political doomscrolling. Since then, I finished Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I’m now halfway through East of Eden by John Steinbeck and have almost finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird to my 11-year-old daughter. I hadn’t been ready to accept the reality of another four years of Donald Trump.

Then, on November 18, my literary shield was penetrated by a glance at my work computer: “Trump confirms his plan for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will involve a national emergency declaration and the military,” the article in The Washington Post read.

Damn it, this fascist couldn’t even give me a few weeks, was my first thought. My second thought was that I needed to talk to my fellow anti-imperialist veteran friends. I needed a little help reorienting my brain to another four years of Trump’s policies.

They reminded me that this is not the first time Trump has threatened to deploy the military on U.S. soil to terrorize refugees and immigrants.

In 2018, Trump promised to send 15,000 members of the National Guard to the border. In the end, the number was closer to 5,200, which set a dangerous precedent that Republican governors followed by sending National Guard units to Texas starting in January 2024. If Trump’s new threats became a reality, despite being a logistical and legal nightmare, and if he removed the 13 million undocumented immigrants from the country, his plan would cost an estimated $88 billion a year, and almost a trillion dollars over a decade.

Even Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said removing just a million of the 13 million undocumented immigrants would be a Herculean task. Jason Houser, ICE’s chief of staff under President Joe Biden, told “60 Minutes” that, “ICE currently has 6,000 staff members. That number would need to rise to 100,000” to deport the numbers Trump and Stephen Miller are talking about.

Forcefully removing 13 million people from this country would require an enormous construction project. As The Intercept recently reported, Trump’s plan would require at least doubling or tripling the number of carceral facilities in the U.S. The U.S. mass incarceration system already imprisons 1.9 million people in a mixture of federal prisons, state prisons, local jails, juvenile jails and immigration jails — more per capita than any country in the world, by the way. If the prison system doubled or tripled in size, the U.S. landscape would be littered with prisons, more so than it already is.

At a Madison Square Garden rally in October, when Trump said he would “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” attendees erupted in raucous cheers. It’s impossible to quantify the devastation these policies would rain down on families across this country. The emotional impact of deporting 13 million people would amount to state-sponsored terrorism on a scale that only a fascist could endorse.

I asked Lyle Jeremy Rubin, an anti-imperialist Marine veteran and author of Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, about his thoughts on Trump’s plan to deploy the military to enforce his mass deportation project.

“The U.S.-Mexico........

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