Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

In her novel, “The Nightingale,” Kristin Hannah vividly recreates the mass deportation of Jews from France by the German Nazi occupiers during World War II. The brutality, violence and misery of the enterprise are captured. Reading it, you feel what it must have felt like to be there.

Now, this election season, we have the Republican Party calling for the fascist idea of mass deportations. At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump promised: “As soon as I take the oath of office, we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Trump has vowed to deport 15 to 20 million undocumented immigrants even though the Department of Homeland Security estimates that there are 11 million in the country. We saw the ‘Mass Deportations Now’ signs at the RNC. Influential MAGA leaders like Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration go-to person, insist MAGA can work around legal and logistical roadblocks to complete the operation.

For such a prominent idea in the Trump universe, there has been little analytical rigor in evaluating the mass deportation project. Trump has offered few specifics. The potential for things to go awry could not be more apparent. We have a poorly thought through idea that is not feasible.

I would suggest the legal, financial and practical challenges to such an endeavor would be enormous. The costs of radically expanding the deportation system would be astronomical and the adverse economic consequences would be catastrophic to the American public. Not surprisingly, Trump has brushed over these dimensions of his plan, as much of it as he has revealed.

The deportation process is multi-part. There is the rounding-up of immigrants, housing and feeding them, medical care, alternatives to detention where possible, court hearings and judicial process. All these come before removal. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t simply arrest people and fly them out of the country immediately.

Those detained have a constitutional right to due process under our legal system although it would appear Trump wants to take that due process right away just as he would like to do with birthright citizenship. Those rights still exist though. Trump would likely try and remove the right to appear before a judge as part of the deportation process. His scheme is about fast-tracking an exodus.

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During Trump’s presidency, it took years for the government to secure an additional 15,000 detention beds. Now Trump is talking about deporting millions. Just the cost of deporting a million people would run into tens of billions of dollars. Congress would have to allocate the money and both Houses would have to approve. That is hardly a given.

The ACLU and other legal challengers won’t be silent. Nor will the millions of Americans who would oppose the scheme. The Nazis were able to remove the Jews from France because of their military control and terror tactics. The American scene is drastically different with far more opportunity for opposition through litigation and direct action.

Many cities have passed laws restricting cooperation with ICE. Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia have refused to cooperate. Most of the 11 million undocumented are long-term residents in the U.S. with established roots. More than a million Americans are married to an undocumented person and many of the undocumented have children who are U.S. citizens. They are spread out all over the country.

Trump talks about using the National Guard for his deportation operation but legal questions abound. The Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t allow the use of the military to enforce laws within the U.S. except in “cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Trump would need to get Congress on board with any plan.

Stephen Miller has talked about building large-scale staging areas near the Southern border but building such detention camps would be a recipe for disaster. Imagine the scenario. Adam Isacson from the Washington Office on Latin America, nails it: “Every community in the U.S. would see people they know and love put on buses. You’d have some very painful images on TV of crying children and families. All of that is incredibly bad press. It’s family separation on steroids.”

The Trump plan fails to consider how integral undocumented immigrants are to our economy. Realization of mass deportations would lead to a dire shortage of low wage workers. Certain industries like fruit and vegetable harvesting, cleaning and housekeeping, child and elder care and construction would be especially hard hit. These are not jobs that American workers have been clamoring to do.

The undocumented pay billions in taxes, including Social Security taxes, even though they are not eligible for benefits. Contrary to the Trump fantasy, mass deportation is likely to harm the economy. America would need food imports because we would lack the labor force to produce and pick all the food we need.

Trump often cites the racist Operation Wetback from the 1954 Eisenhower era as a model of how government can do a mass deportation. An estimated 1.3 million Mexicans, mostly single men, were put on buses, planes and boats and were deported. Trump doesn’t mention that many U.S. citizens were wrongly racially profiled and deported. Nor does he explain that the operation was a racial terror campaign designed to prompt people to self-deport.

Advocating mass deportation is a shameful publicity stunt based in racism and xenophobia. It is a scapegoating exercise meant to appeal to the worst in people. It is about finding a group to hate on. History shows how mass deportations invariably go wrong.