This move actually makes zero fucking sense.
Having people in our country who are willing to work less money than the average citizen labor costs are low. That basically means more money for him and his oligarch buddies.
He's already won the election. He doesn't have to keep posturing like this. And he's not going to be elected again, so either he (hopefully) has no third term, or he'll prevent the 2028 elections from being free and fair.
My prediction is that nothing will actually come of this and he's saying this to keep his approval rating high.
Either that or he's even more racist than he is greedy and self-centered
He’s already won the election. He doesn’t have to keep posturing like this.
That was never his end goal, and you're naive to think otherwise.
As for the rest, you're missing a key step - to get them all "deported", first they need to be rounded up, and put in camps (we already past this point a while back), and then since they're already in camps, they might as well be put to work. For free (another point we've past). When they start dying off in big enough numbers for it to affect production, there will be another group marked for "deportation" and rounded up for their turn.
This isn't fascism's first fucking rodeo, and it isn't only now getting started, it has been in motion for a good while now.
Actually serves pretty well if one's goal were to further destabilise things. People have already been convinced that illegal immigrants are to blame for all economic problems (even though it is easier to prove the extreme opposite through a cursory search on the internet), maybe if the downward slope is gentle enough, people won't start doubting the efficacy of the initially applied solution. Maybe the point was to get them to the next level, get them angry at something else after everything is done with the false problem.
I just don't see Trump actually wanting what's his version of "best" for the country. I think he's on a power play, and the country's just the kindling.
Maybe I'm talking complete nonsense, but this feels like a... logical escalation. To what, I cannot fathom, although we've seen similar movements preclude Totalitarian/Authoritarian regime solidification periods before, where the desperate masses clung to the wrong solution.
I just want to point out that declaring a state of emergency to "deal with" illegal immigrants will allow the construction of large camps all over the country where undesirables can be 'concentrated' for 'processing'.
After rounding up illegal immigrants, maybe they'll invalidate the status of legal immigrants that knowingly employed, illegal immigrants. Or housed illegal immigrants. Or defended illegal immigrants. Of course these people will need to be detained in the same camps while it all gets processed.
The condition of the camps won't be great, maybe the detainees can work in specially approved facilities while immigration status gets processed, this will help alleviate the cost of camp maintenance and improve living conditions.
Maybe the detainees can be rented out to local plantations to subsidize the cost of feeding them.
He's not going to deport what can easily be made into slave labor and he's not going to need a third term if he even makes it all the way through his second without croaking, being 25th'd out by his own people or some nice defenestration. The point is to make sure Republicans/Russia never again leave office, not that Trump doesn't.