The DHS is fantasizing about 100 million deportations, but their broken math drags American citizens into the plan

The Department of Homeland Security ended the year by posting a fantasy. On December 31, the official DHS X account shared a vision of “America after 100 million deportations” like it was a tourism ad. They tried selling a nation supposedly at peace, “no longer besieged by the third world.”

“The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” The DHS really thought that caption was appropriate for an official government account. But the bigger problem was math. Evidently, there are not 100 million deportable people in the United States. Not undocumented, documented, or even combined. The entire foreign-born population is estimated at around 45 million.

So, even if they deport every undocumented immigrant, every legal resident, every visa holder, and then keep going, they would still come up tens of millions short. Deporting 100 million doesn’t just overshoot reality. It requires deporting tens of millions of U.S. citizens to make the fantasy work.

Suddenly, the post doesn’t read like immigration policy so much as ideological signaling after knowing the fact. There’s no version of this math where citizenship survives intact. On top of it, “peace,” “besieged,” and “third world” aren’t administrative terms. They’re civilizational and divide the population into those who belong and those who “contaminate.”

When a government agency uses that framing, the numbers don’t matter as much as the message. And as if to underline the unseriousness of it all, the image DHS used wasn’t even theirs. The post uses an artwork by Japanese painter Hiroshi Nagai, taken without permission. Nagai also publicly objected to his work being repurposed for a political message he did not endorse. (via AOL)

So, in a single post, the DHS managed to promote an impossible deportation scheme, echo far-right nationalist rhetoric, and commit copyright infringement. Even after backlash, there was no clarification, correction, or attempt to explain what they meant. Because the moment they try, the number will collapse and the fantasy will evaporate.

“100 million” deportation dreams only work if you don’t ask who those people are. And the harsh truth is, you don’t fantasize about deporting 100 million people unless you’ve accepted that millions of American citizens are expendable.

The question that thus arises is how a government can so casually float mass removal without defining its targets? How extreme does the rhetoric have to be before people push back? Because the DHS didn’t accidentally say too much. They said exactly enough to normalize their radical plans.