But if he wins another term as president, he’ll try to put it in place anyway.

Kamala Harris has been criticized by Republicans for not “fixing” immigration. But let’s consider for a moment the ideas from the other side. Let’s talk about mass deportations.

Not about the wrenching cruelty it would necessarily involve: separating undocumented parents from their citizen children; forcing American kids to drop out of school to follow mom and dad to an unknown future over the border. Let’s not talk about the devastation it would inflict on the economy, which would be deprived, at a stroke, of about 5 percent of its workforce.

Let’s, rather, talk about the logistics of the enterprise — the implications for law enforcement, the judiciary and the bureaucracy at large. Taken together, the logistical hurdles are formidable. This suggests that though Trump might really be itching to deport people by the millions, he will fail.

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Consider the numbers for a moment. According to estimates from the Department of Homeland Security, there are some 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. They are to be found all across the country: 1.8 million in California, 95,000 in Oklahoma, 5,000 in Wyoming.

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(There isn’t, however, even a consensus on the meaning of the term. The DHS defines illegal immigrants as those who have not been either legally admitted or paroled. But there are hundreds of thousands of migrants paroled into the United States under Biden administration programs that have been challenged in court as illegal by governors of Republican-controlled states.)

Just finding all of these folks will be a Sisyphean challenge. There are people harvesting strawberries near Fresno, Calif., or apples in Washington state’s Yakima Valley, landscaping in Georgia and building homes in Arizona, and cleaning hotel rooms in Houston. They run kitchens in restaurants across urban America and care for the babies of citizen mothers all over the place.

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The United States has never rid itself of people at this scale. The most immigrants “removed” in a single year by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the authority in charge of weeding out unauthorized immigrants inside the United States rather than at the border, was 432,334 in 2013. At that pace, Trump’s plan would take decades.

Consider Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to hold America’s undocumented in “large-scale staging grounds near the border.” It would take almost five cities the size and density of Houston to house 11 million people. If, instead, they are quickly expelled as Trump prefers, the government would need a lot of planes. ICE flew 1,651 removal flights in the year leading up to July. Flying 11 million people out would require 58,201 flights in fully loaded Boeing 737-800s.

Even the low-hanging fruit will be hard to pick. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a backlog of about 1.3 million immigrants in asylum proceedings. Justice Department officials are working through an additional case backlog of 3.7 million, of which 1.1 million are requesting asylum. These people would presumably be easier to eject once a court decided on their........

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