Prologue
The precipitating moment comes when the Diente de Dragon cartel kidnaps a school bus full of Laredo, Texas, teens to hold for ransom against the release of trafficker-general Marco Malencio, captured one mile into Nuevo Leon after getting tipped-off about an impending Homeland Security sting.
When the bus-snatchers execute the bus driver, Special Operations forces moves in. Most children are saved, but seven perish during the assault.
After consultation with Vice President Ted Cruz and Defense Secretary John Bolton, President Donald Trump implements by executive order a mass-deportation edict, countervailing federal-court injunctions on his immigration policies.
In the weeks before Operation Repatriation takes effect, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants take Mitt Romney up on his 2012 offer and return to their homeland. Tenancy in entire apartment complexes is decimated. Smaller hordes head north, defying the deployment of National Guard troops along the border with Mexico.
There is upheaval in undocumented communities, as non-citizens contemplate the impossibility of economic survival. To seek public assistance of any kind — police protection, welfare, healthcare, or legal representation — is now tantamount to surrendering to deportation. Employers, newly constrained by law, begin double-and triple-checking immigration status for all hires.
There is a sudden, inexorable labor crunch in industries where illegal workers are most represented, and mass disruptions of certain market streams. A great emptying-out impacts the aged-care, janitorial, landscaping, food-service, construction, fast-food, and agricultural sectors, followed by a scramble to fill positions with U.S. citizens willing and able to do the work.
Large demonstrations and violent riots occur and escalate. Legal challenges are banished by Trump’s popular executive action, but that does not stop a cluster of entities–from the ACLU to La Raza—from throwing eleventh-hour Hail, Marys.
A wall from San Diego to Brownsville, armed with weapons and surveillance technology that has survived the American military’s sequester-driven dress-down, has gotten its final tweaks. Those returning to Mexico and points south, either voluntarily or in custody, pass checkpoints most had avoided on the way in.
Dollars usually earmarked for services and support for undocumented immigrants quickly stockpile in the coffers. Some of that windfall is diverted to fund the massive deportation effort, including buses, trains, holding centers, and firepower. As the date of full implementation looms, surgical round-ups in areas of known immigrant concentration commence.
Scenes like the one in which young Cuban exile Elian Gonzalez was forcibly removed from his stateside family play out across the county, but with a role reversal. The adults are subject to deportation, and left with the choice of either bringing U.S.-born children with them or leaving them in the care of trusted legal-citizen family or friends.
Armed resistance cells have formed. Trump’s braintrust estimates that if 1 percent of the millions of illegal immigrants in the country offer violent resistance to deportation, enforcement arms will face upwards of a hundred-and-ten-thousand Mexican expats willing to die fighting for their right to stay on American soil. As battalions from various service branches enter the field, it is clear the estimates are low.
In addition to the last-stand illegals, such aggregations have become magnets for platoons of disaffected citizens in solidarity, and homegrown and foreign terrorists for whom the issue of illegal immigration is distinctly ancillary.
Thirty days after his executive order has gone into effect, Trump appears before the people, telling them that everything that can be done is being done, in the most humane manner possible, and has been wholly necessary if the nation is to survive as envisioned by the Founders.
Six months later, only the statuses of mop-up operations against pockets of resistance remain to be assessed. The highest concentrations of stateside illegal aliens are those serving out sentences in U.S. prisons.
Plans are unveiled for a concrete skyscraper in downtown El Paso, headquarters for a new bureaucracy tasked with overseeing immigration policy’s new normal.
Epilogue
As his first term winds down, President Trump signs the Assistance Accountability Act, which stipulates that Mexico and other Hispanic governments prove to federal forensic accountants that the assistance provided by the act—a dollar amount almost exactly one half the amount previously devoted to illegal immigrant entitlements—is flowing through channels and getting to the people of Mexico, Central, and South America.
Images via AP Images
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