DHS ‘100 Million Deportations’ Claim Was No Joke. Bovino Had ‘Master Plan’ to Purge Nearly a Third of the Country
This month, a GOP senator accused an immigration researcher of “hyperbole” for saying the Department of Homeland Security was advocating “ethnic cleansing” with its calls to expel 100 million people.
When the official social media account for the US Department of Homeland Security made a post glorifying the idea of “100 million deportations," it was dismissed by many as a joke, while those who said it amounted to a call for ”ethnic cleansing“ were accused of ”hyperbole.“
But the man who once led President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign says he was always dead serious about purging nearly a third of the country’s population.
On Tuesday, The New York Times published an interview with Gregory Bovino, the former “commander-at-large” of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, who was unceremoniously demoted back to his old post in El Centro, California this January, after immigration agents’ rampage across Minnesota—which included the public executions of two American citizens—ignited nationwide backlash.
Bovino, who is retiring this week at the age of 55, told the Times he had few regrets about his tenure leading the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which were marked by rampant racial profiling, large indiscriminate roundups, violations of civil liberties, and violent attacks on peaceful protesters.
But he wishes he had gone much further. According to the Times:
Mr. Bovino said he had a master plan that was in motion before his exile back to El Centro. It would have neutralized protesters, he said, and made it possible to deport 100 million people.
That is a goal that the Department of Homeland Security has widely promoted. If it sounds extreme, that’s because it’s nearly 10 times the estimated number of undocumented people in the country. It is also more than a quarter of the entire US population.
As Common Dreams reported back in late December, when DHS posted a meme about "100 million deportations," that number bears striking significance, since it was close to the number of people living in the US who identified as non-white on the 2020 census—about 96 million.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, it's also approximately the number of foreign-born people and their children, which was about 97.2 million as of 2024.
There are about 47 million foreign-born people living in the US, meaning that such a policy would also entail the deportation of around 53 million US-born citizens.
While Bovino and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have lost their jobs, it's unclear whether the new head of DHS, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, will join the push to expel 100 million people from the US.
The Times provided little exposition about how precisely Bovino planned to carry out what would be by far the largest campaign of forced displacement in American, if not world, history.
However, the article demonstrates that the idea was not simply a troll post by a social media intern, but a sincere objective for a man who answered directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security and was elevated to the position of America’s most powerful immigration enforcer.
Bovino's admission of this goal was of particular note to David J. Bier, an immigration researcher at the Cato Institute and a prominent critic of Trump's immigration policy. He discussed the "100 million deportations" goal earlier this month during a Senate Budget Committee hearing.
DHS's post came up after Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) attempted to discredit Bier by reading off supposedly "hyperbolic" posts he'd made on social media, including one accusing Republicans of thinking "they can troll their way into us accepting ethnic cleansing."
Bier responded that his post was "in regard to a Department of Homeland Security post about 100 million deportations. That is what DHS has tweeted from their account."
As Kennedy attempted to shout over Bier, the researcher said: "100 million deportations would be ethnic cleansing. You would be removing one-third of the country."
"And you don't think this is hyperbolic?" Kennedy interrupted, smirking. The senator brought up another of Bier's posts in which he claimed Trump was carrying out a "population purge agenda," adding sarcastically, "No hyperbole there!"
“When I talk about ‘population purge,’ I’m talking about the fact that they’re trying to deport US-born citizens, people born here,” Bier responded. “They are trying to deport them as well. So it’s not a ‘mass deportation' agenda. It’s also an agenda intended to reduce the population of the United States, including US-born citizens. So these are not ‘hyperbolic’ statements.”
Kennedy ignored Bier's argument, instead derisively asking "what planet" he was from and saying he triggered his "gag reflex." It is not clear if Kennedy was aware of Trump's frequent calls to "denaturalize" American citizens or his administration's efforts to eliminate the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship.
The Houston-based immigration attorney Steven Brown said that Bovino’s apparent “master plan” was “exactly what Bier testified about, since 100 million deportations would expel ”one-third of the US population and would necessitate citizens being deported to accomplish.“
Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the idea "just dangerously insane," and something out of "white supremacist fan fiction."
"These are the armed fanatics who were given police power in our cities," she added.
Noting that many of the commenters who replied to his posts expressed support for the idea, Bier warned that "DHS's 100 million deportations ethnic cleansing agenda is spreading throughout the right-wing echo chamber as it is intended. It is only a matter of time before this extremism becomes standard rhetoric for GOP candidates."
