It does happen here

Mass deportation. It's an Orwellian phrase we associate with the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. Sending armed troops to pull millions of people, including babies and seniors, from their homes, forcing them into squalid camps, and then transferring them to a land where they have nothing — it sounds like something only a crazed dictator would do. Not a democratic country, certainly not my own country. But in fact, the U.S. has done it multiple times, and not just during wartime. The Trail of Tears, when President Andrew Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act to expel tens of thousands of Native Americans from their land. During the Depression, when the U.S. kicked out up to 1.8 million people of Mexican descent, half of them U.S. citizens, to preserve jobs for whites. And Operation Wetback (yes, really), when President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the Border Patrol to truck over a million Mexican laborers back to Mexico. All of these actions were popular at the time, and all were seen in retrospect as shameful chapters in U.S. history.

Yet here we are again. Studies show that deporting immigrants doesn't help the economy; it hurts it. But Donald Trump says that if he's elected president, he will expel up to 20 million people, a figure far higher than the 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be in the U.S. now. At the Republican convention, attendees carried signs blaring "Mass Deportation Now" and chanted "Send them back!" In a June poll, 6 in 10 voters said they supported the idea, including a third of Democrats, while just under half supported mass detention centers where those arrested (some of them doubtless citizens) would be sent for processing. Do these Americans understand how traumatic such an upheaval would be? The spectacle of troops going door to door, of families being rounded up, would be heart-wrenching. The blatant racism of the endeavor — it's not Norwegians over-staying visas who would be targeted — would rip this nation apart. Mass deportation is not un-American. But it should be.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine .