While the Trump regime’s violent and sometimes illegal detentions of law-abiding undocumented immigrants has provoked spirited resistance and loss of public support, a group of right-wing organizations calling itself the Mass Deportation Coalition wants more. Much more.
While some administration allies have urged a focus on removing violent criminals, the Mass Deportation Coalition demands “an operational adjustment” to target every possibly deportable person: “Millions of deportable aliens should no longer be treated as a by-product of collateral enforcement by allocating a disproportionate volume of resources towards a small sub-set of criminals.”
Introducing a Friday blog post, Thomas Klingenstein, chairman of the far-right Claremont Institute, declared that “Immigration enforcement now sits at the center of America’s cold civil war.” In the post, two leaders of a new Mass Deportation Coalition say that a strategy focused on removing violent criminals “does not come close to fulfilling what was promised or what is required.” They demand that Trump and his new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin carry out a plan to “remove illegal aliens without political carve-outs or deference to special interests.”
In a move reminiscent of Project 2025’s written agenda for a MAGAfied federal government, the coalition has produced a playbook that it says charts a path toward the deportation of at least one million people in 2026. (According to the coalition the Trump administration deported about 350,000 in the first year of his second term.)
The Heritage Foundation cheered the publication of the playbook, calling “the largest deportation operation in American history” essential to Trump’s efforts to bring about a new “Golden Age” in America.
The coalition’s playbook portrays mass deportation as an existential necessity to ward off “national collapse.” As the nation gears up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, coalition members “reject the fashionable idea that the nation sprang into existence merely because a group of men signed a document in Philadelphia.” The nation, they assert, “already existed in culture, habit, and belief.” A nation, they say, is “a people with a shared story and a common inheritance.”
Long before independence, a distinct civilization had taken root on this continent. Its institutions, moral assumptions, and public life reflected the inheritance of Western political thought, especially the values of the Old Testament. The settlers who built communities along the Atlantic seaboard did not consider themselves participants in an abstract experiment open to anyone, anywhere, at any time. They were building a society—one with shared norms, obligations, and expectations.
The group’s 21-step playbook complains about habeas petitions delaying deportations and calls on the Justice Department to Secure a Supreme Court ruling “limiting the authority of trial-level district court judges in review of immigration matters.” It also urges states to challenge the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v Doe that prevents states from denying undocumented children access to public education.
The Mass Deportation Coalition, formed in February, “is composed of immigration law and policy experts, former senior and rank and file law enforcement officials, advocates, and supporters who will provide a permanent support base for mass deportation.”
In addition to the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute, coalition partners include Project 2025 participant American Moment, the religious-right Center for Baptist Leadership, anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform, and a number of other national, state, and local right-wing groups. In January, FAIR argued that Trump would be “fully justified” to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against people protesting the administration’s detention and deportation actions.
“MDC’s existence is testament to the inhumane commitments of the anti-immigrant Right,” wrote Political Research Associates’ Ethan Fauré on Monday. “These groups aren’t dissuaded by the needless and deadly havoc their favored policies bring to cities and untold numbers of immigrant families (citizen and noncitizen) and communities since the second Trump administration began. By the coalition’s own admission, they want to make matters worse.”
