Former President Donald Trump is proposing a mass deportation if he is elected into office, and that could have major economic and social impacts in Maryland, a state where immigration has for years been making up for losses in population and the native-born labor force.

Nearly 17% of the state’s population is foreign born, and about 225,000 people are in the state without authorization. Maryland is also home to just under another 250,000 people who are authorized to live in the country but are not naturalized: that can include those on Temporary Protected Status, asylum seekers, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, student visa holders and seasonal workers.

Some of those residents could also be subject to the whims of the next presidential administration.

“Immigrants are being used as political pawns in this election. You can't turn on the TV, you can’t hear a debate. You can't see an interview without being flooded with the anti- immigrant rhetoric,” said Cathryn Paul, the policy director for CASA in Action, the advocacy arm of immigrants rights group CASA.

That rhetoric, Paul said, is coming right from former President Trump “and truly the Republican Party as a whole.”

It’s “devastating” for Maryland’s immigrant community and scary, she says. CASA in Action has endorsed Democratic candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris for president and is campaigning for down-ticket Democrats across the region.

Immigration has become one of the most critical issues of the 2024 election with 82% of Republicans saying it was the most important issue, second only to the economy, according to a September poll from the Pew Research Center (meanwhile, 39% of Democrats ranked immigration as a top issue).

The former president’s immigration policy basically boils down to his promise to enact mass deportations of people living in the United States without authorization. The Pew Research Center estimates there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country as of 2022 (down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007).

“No one’s off the table. If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.” said Tom Homan during the Republican National Convention in July. Homan is Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the former president has said he would hire him again.

“The bottom line is: every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It's a crime to enter this country illegally,” said Homan, who is also listed as a contributor to Project 2025’s the Mandate for Policy Leadership, a multi-pronged blueprint written by the conservative Heritage Foundation designed for the next Republican president to overhaul the executive branch.

Who? And how many? Maryland by the numbers.

About 5% of the state’s population is undocumented, according to census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, with El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico being the countries of origin for over half of that population.

“These folks are working in a central job, working in construction, they're working in education, they're working in healthcare, right? The list sort of goes on and on,” said Paul, with CASA in Action.

Most of Maryland’s working age unauthorized community is employed, especially in construction, waste management services, along with hospitality and entertainment.

“They are paying a lot of money in taxes. It is a myth that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes,” said Paul.

Undocumented people in Maryland paid around $779.3 million in taxes in 2022, according to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning, nonprofit think tank. Study authors reasoned that that number could be over $1B if all undocumented people had access to work authorization.

“Undocumented people aren't just some abstract, separate population from us. They are very much an integral part of our communities, companies and families,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, a Baltimore-based nonprofit focused on helping refugees and asylum seekers.

Approximately, 10% of Maryland households have at least one undocumented member, higher than the national average.

“When we hear about the largest deportation operation in history, as I think President Trump has described it, it masks what this would be on a very human level — and that is the largest family separation operation in history,” said Vignarajah.

When Cecilia Vega asked Homan on 60 Minutes how he would approach deportation for mixed families Homan had a simple answer: “Families can be deported together.”

Also on Vignarajah’s mind is what the next administration could mean for asylum seekers and people living in the country on temporary protected status (TPS): a designation awarded to a list of administration-approved countries where catastrophic conditions prevent nationals from returning to their home countries. TPS allows people to live and work in the country legally while being protected from deportation.

Senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller endorsed the idea of ending TPS to The New York Times late last year. Trump has done it before, ending TPS for hundreds of thousands of people during his administration.

Update: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of foreign-born residents in Maryland. It has been corrected.