Apr 12th, The Tablet

President Donald Trump promises to deport ‘millions and millions of criminal aliens’ but the evidence from church-affiliated shelters on either side of the US-Mexico border is that he is scrambling to find the numbers that will satisfy his Maga base / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico. They stand silently, facing the altar and the massive raised platform next to Chamizal park and within sight of the Rio Grande river, where in February 2016 Pope Francis celebrated Mass, delivering a homily exhorting the powerful on both sides of the border to treat poor and long-suffering migrants and refugees with compassion and dignity.

Eleven huge white field tents of waterproof canvas now stand here arrayed in the sun, anticipating the arrival of thousands of immigrants that the US administration of President Donald Trump says will soon be deported, dumped unceremoniously over the border into Mexico from the United States.

Across that border, in El Paso, Texas, the construction of a 10,000-bed immigration detention centre at the massive 1,700 squaremile Fort Bliss army base is about to begin, announced during a 26 March visit to the base by Trump’s newly appointed secretary of the army, Daniel Driscoll. Four days later, the first two of eight M1126 “Stryker” armoured fighting vehicles arrived at El Paso, visibly underscoring preparations for Trump’s promised “hardening” of the US border. It was all part of the pledge made to his supporters in November to deliver the “largest deportation programme in American history”.

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