This is bad, because it's serious problem that needs to be addressed and empty platitudes don't fix anything.

Let's do some quick math: a popular estimate is that there are 12,000,000 people in the US from foreign countries that aren't citizens or green card holders. I'm not engaging in some politically-correct avoidance of the word "illegal," because many of them are now classified as "refugees," which is a legal status that needs to be overcome in order to remove them. For the sake of this article, I’ll coin the word “ejectees.” There are roughly 250 working days for government employees each year (for government values of "working" ), which gives us a nice, round 1000 working days in a Presidential term. This means that, on average, you have to deal with removing 12,000 people every day. In order to do this, you have to:

1) Find them
2) Detain them
3) Transport them
4) Hold them
5) Put them through some sort of legal process
6) Ship them home.

The holding capacity for this process is equal to the number of days it takes for steps 4-6 times the average number of people per day you have to deal with. The US Federal Bureau of Prisons employs roughly 37,000 people to deal with roughly 160,000 prisoners (I’m only looking at federal prisons, not state or local, and I’m assuming these numbers scale out), for a ratio of one employee for every four prisoners. Assuming it takes 30 days to process each ejectee, that means your detention capacity needs to be at least 360,000. If you had federal prisons to hold them in, you’d need 90,000 employees. Since you’ll need to keep them in temporary camps, let’s up this by 50% to 135,000 employees times an average salary of $78,000 per year plus benefits of $23,500 for an average total comp of $101,500 and just under $14 billion per year total, not including hiring costs, office space, equipment, etc., or the cost of the camps themselves, food, water, clothing, medical care, etc. for your detainees, and on and on and on. Let’s just round it out to $30 billion a year. But even this assumes all of the legislation, lawsuits, and setup occur instantaneously and I’m guessing that won’t happen and no only with the annual cost go up, but we still haven’t included the additional cost of rushing everything.

Then you need tens of thousands of judges or magistrates to process the cases, the clerks and assistants, the people who locate and detain the ejectees, the people who ship them home, etc., their management, office space, hearing rooms, computers and phones, and a million other details.

Getting them back is a challenge. Try finding 12,000 airline seats per day. Good luck bussing them through several countries over land. Perhaps the beleaguered cruise line industry can lend a hand, and some boats. Lots and lots of boats, because you’ll probably need at least 15 days round-trip to ship your ejectees and 12,000 times 15 days is 180,000 beds. But that number assumes everything starts instantaneously, so increase that by at least 25% (225,000 beds). Does this much capacity even exist?

Even then, this assumes the home countries of the ejectees will just welcome them back. Shipping a few million people with no homes or jobs into countries that are already horribly short of these things is not something they will readily accept. So they’ll have to be coerced or bribed as well.

There’s no point in working out every last detail in a blog post, but this should help you imagine the massive expenses and absolute logistical nightmare involved here. It’s probably a trillion-dollar task, total, assuming it’s even possible.

Or, we could, you know, starve them out. Cut off all of their welfare and they’ll go home.

Really?

Just because the potential ejectees are uneducated doesn’t mean they’re completely stupid. Most of them have no homes to return to. Would you rather live in a cardboard box in New York or Caracas? That’s not rocket science. Even the most imbecilic person, like a PhD from Harvard, can figure this one out. And most of the ejectees are probably a lot smarter than your average Ivy League PhD, at least when it comes to practical concerns.

So then you have 12,000,000 people with no food or shelter. This will totally not cause the most insane crime wave in the history if this nation.

“No problem, we have guns, we’ll just shoot ‘em all!”

Yeah, right. How many pictures of half-starved children with their brains blown out of what’s left of their skulls is the nation going to stomach before even the most die-hard (literally) MAGA person backs down?

So that’s not happening, either.

What’s the solution? Beats me. But it’s a ridiculously hard problem, and the first step needs to be stop pretending it’s not a ridiculously hard problem.