Not a “humor” squib by Andy Borowitz but a subdued analysis by Evan Osnos, this New Yorker article (Sept. 26 issue) attempts to answer the question, “What Would Trump Do?” with: Pretty Much Nothing.
He will have trouble finding 4,000 appointees to fill his administration, because many Republicans have solemnly declared they won’t work with him. A summary Muslim-ban might be held up or nixed by the courts. It’s going to be hard getting the money to Build The Wall.
More thrillingly factual is a recollection of how things went during the last mass-deportation, in the 1950s:
Eisenhower’s program, Operation Wetback, was launched in June, 1954. Led by retired General Joseph M. Swing, it used spotter planes to locate border crossers and direct teams of jeeps to intercept them. According to “Impossible Subjects,” a study of illegal-immigration history, by Mae M. Ngai, in the first three months the program apprehended a hundred and seventy thousand people, and some were returned to Mexico by cargo ship. After a riot during one such voyage, a congressional investigation described the conditions as those of “an eighteenth-century slave ship” and a “penal hell ship.”
