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At a campaign rally in the border state of Arizona on Oct. 24, Donald Trump roused the crowd with a , after lamenting that the country has become "like a garbage can for the world."

This promise to round up and ship off the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. who lack permanent legal status was one of Trump's signature campaign promises in 2024, and one of his biggest applause lines. Trump —say the economy—would leave his audiences bored, the New York Times reported at the end of October.

Several found that a second Trump administration would face myriad challenges in effecting mass deportation at this scale, and that the effort would require a Herculean .

A study by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, calculated that , and hundreds of thousands of new immigration agents, judges and other staff. Fiscal analyses have concluded that mass deportation on this scale could . Even at its current rate of enforcement, detention, and deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already for staff and detainees," at its facilities according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report released in September. Many of those detention locations are run by private companies on former prison grounds. Bloomberg News reported in October that Trump's deportation plan

To get around the already backlogged deportation system, Trump and his advisors have said they . The law—which was used during the two World Wars—allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime without the usual due process. Its use would draw immediate legal challenges, and legal experts are divided over how such an effort would fare in the courts. The U.S. is not at war with any of the countries from which large numbers of migrants arrive, which the language of the act requires. Courts, however, are often deferential to the executive branch over this kind of authority.

Enforcement efforts would likely include the use of novel surveillance technology. Some tech observers on the border, including surveillance towers, high-tech blimps, incognito license plate readers and biometric readers.

Trump has also repeatedly said he to carry out elements of his deportation agenda, as well as the National Guard in states where the governor is sympathetic to this goal.

Some have already declared that they will not participate in mass deportation efforts. Even officials who have raised concerns about the challenges created by large influxes of migrants are not necessarily interested in mass deportation. In Whitewater, Wisconsin, by efforts to politicize the situation in his town, where at least 1,000 mostly Nicaraguan migrants have recently settled.

Meyer said his department has dealt with "very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country," mostly related to poverty, language barriers and administrative challenges—like the fact that many migrants don't have, and struggle to get, driver's licenses.

But what Meyer said was not happening was a , a claim that's been a cornerstone of Trump's campaign for mass deportation. Meyer told ProPublica that the new immigrants aren't committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents.

In Aurora, Colorado, another police chief says that Trump's claims don't represent the reality on the ground. Chief Todd Chamberlain , despite Trump describing it as "overrun" by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua (TDA). Trump has identified .

Chamberlain said that there is crime related to TDA members, but that Trump's rhetoric has dramatically overstated the situation. On Oct. 23, NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland Security has , although some experts the outlet cited said that number was certainly an undercount.

Beyond the legal and logistical challenges of Trump's deportation plan are profound potential economic costs. one Arkansas business leader told the New York Times, referring to the labor that migrants provide in fields that are either unattractive to U.S. workers or where there are . Some analyses suggest that a complete mass deportation could cut more than a trillion dollars of production from the U.S. economy and .

None of that accounts for the human toll of mass deportations. Writing for Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera tells the story of Marco, a Honduran man in Georgia working in construction and landscaping. Marco was deported once before, in 2010, and had planned to make peace with life in Honduras. But the threat of violence by local gangs there, and the prospect of making 10 times his annual income, .

Like most undocumented people in the U.S., Marco lives in a mixed-status home, meaning "some relatives have citizenship or green cards and some have neither." If Marco were deported, Herrera writes: "His family are the ones who would truly miss him—the girls waiting for their uncle to get home each sundown, with mud on his boots and wood chips on his shirt."