Dec. 31, the last day of 2025, the official Instagram account of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an image of a sandy beach, with a vintage car inexplicably parked on the sand, a palm tree blowing in the wind and a wave cresting beneath a bright blue sky. The image’s text, written in a light white font across the blue backdrop, reads, “America After 100 Million Deportations.”
How can you conceptualize 100 million as a number? Aside from money, 100 million is so large a sum that it can be quite difficult to think about. Try picturing a group of 100 million people. Notice how the faces blur, and the bodies begin to meld together, forming an amorphous, homogenous mass in your brain.
Beyond the bizarre call for some sort of return to when the United States was apparently a tropical resort, the post’s invocation of “100 Million” is truly disturbing. Unlike the federal government’s other pro-deportation posts that bear resemblances to titles of white supremacist books, popular QAnon catchphrases and Nazi slogans, this irrational number, this nihilistic goal, does not even warrant the categorization of a “dogwhistle.” It is a straightforward, simple and honest announcement of the U.S. government’s plan to ethnically cleanse the country.
I would be remiss not to mention that there are only about 53 million immigrants in the United States. Of that 53 million, roughly 14 million immigrants are undocumented. Who, then, is the government planning to deport? Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S., with a current population of around 68 million. More broadly, four out of ten Americans identify with a racial or ethnic minority.
It seems that the DHS has also begun picturing 100 million people and has decided that the amorphous mass in their minds, their lump of de-individualized, dehumanized beings, is unwanted and decidedly non-white. Britannica defines ethnic cleansing as “the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups.” It’s not much of an intellectual leap to imagine that the DHS’s post of their idyllic beach, with its spotless sand, has been cleaned up for only a certain group of people to enjoy.
There is another important usage of 100 million that lurks behind Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ daily quotas and infamous policies like the “Muslim ban.” Stephen Miller, an advisor to President Trump and the architect of some of his most insidious immigration initiatives, uses the number 100 million in a way that makes it seem shockingly small.
According to an article by The New York Times in 2025, Trump said “…that if it was up to Mr. Miller, there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller.” This ideology is the motivating force behind the occupation of cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where immigration agents are targeting people of color without probable cause.
There’s no more pretending that this isn’t the start of an uphill battle against institutionalized white supremacy, or that ICE is only after immigrants anymore. Sophia Cha of the Mdewakanton Dakota tribe was recently detained in Minneapolis and is just one of numerous Native Americans who have been racially profiled by ICE agents, agents who care more about skin tone than citizenship status.
This kind of racial profiling has been made acceptable, not just by social standards, but in the highest court of the country. In Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents can arrest people based on the language they speak, how they look, where they work and other arbitrary stereotypes. In Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, he concluded that “apparent Mexican ancestry” was enough to stop and detain someone, based on “common sense.” This is where that amorphous mass, that impossible goal of 100 million deportations, becomes legal precedent.
Following this guise of common sense, it is rational then that the executive branch would move to attack birthright citizenship as an inroad to increasing the number of people who are eligible for deportation. In President Trump’s executive order, he states that if someone’s parents are not in the country legally or are in the country temporarily, then they should not be automatically granted citizenship, despite Fourteenth Amendment rights. Thankfully, so far, the federal appeals courts have blocked the order, but the sentiment and the effort to decide now who can be a citizen, even if you are born on this soil, is a racially motivated one.
Let’s return to the nebulous mass of 100 million people floating around in your mind’s eye. I want you to do something for me; imagine your grandma walking out of that cloud. Your best friend. Your partner. Try to picture as many individual faces as you can. For every step the DHS takes towards erasing the peculiarities and the personhoods of people they deem unworthy of sitting on their imaginary white sand beach, make an effort to listen to the stories of people who have been abducted, or are afraid to leave their homes without their documentation.
Because it’s not an intangible swarm that the government is actively working to extricate out of the country — it’s a breathing, surging crowd that you’re either standing in the middle of, or someone you love is.
Contact Ava LaLonde at lalonde@oxy.edu.
