After the rhetoric comes the reality. For anyone who thought Donald Trump’s immigration talk was just stirring up fear to get elected, his first appointments should make clear he is going to work to make it happen.

Trump is bringing Stephen Miller in as deputy chief of staff for policy and Tom Homan will have the nebulous overarching role of “border czar.”

We know what these people are about. Miller was in many ways responsible for the most horrific policies associated with the first Trump term, up to and including the infamous family separation policy and the long-standing Title 42 debacle.

While many others in the Trump orbit are merely grifters, career climbers and assorted other opportunists, Miller is a zealot, a true believer. He wakes up every day with the goal of identifying ways to punish and exclude immigrants, scouring all available administrative paths to this end.

Homan, too, understands that he has received a directive from his incoming boss to stretch the limits of legality and morality in pursuing the program of an unprecedented mass deportation operation.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” last month, Homan said with chilling nonchalance that “of course” there was a solution to the issue of U.S. citizen children being separated from immigrant parents who were deported: to deport the families all together. It didn’t seem to cross his mind at all that deporting citizens in any capacity is unlawful.

Where the courts once helped parry some of the Trump administration’s worst and most brazenly unlawful efforts on immigration, we’re far less able to rely on these as a backstop now, stacked as they are with Trump loyalists and right-wing ideologues.

Take the question of birthright citizenship; it is indisputably clearly spelled out in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment for almost a century and a half. Yet in a recent interview, Trump-appointed Federal Appeals Judge James Ho, now occasionally floated as a potential Supreme Court pick, claimed that “the children of invading aliens” — leaning on a right-wing talking point about humanitarian migration being some sort of invasion — are not entitled to that right.

This is still a fringe position, and would not necessarily succeed in a legal case, but there are now dozens of barely-qualified federal judges populating the district and appeals courts, ready to potentially sign off on these and many more extreme policies.

If the prior Congress, with the House held narrowly by the GOP and the Senate by the Democrats, with a Democratic president, was not able to pass any sort of immigration reform measure, this is certainly not happening in a GOP trifecta. What is likelier to happen is a lurch towards further restrictionist policy in Congress, all of the security and surveillance that Republicans have sought for years without any of the paths to citizenship or additional protections that these deals usually include.

As much as Trump’s Republican Party likes to pretend it is taking up the mantle of Reagan and Lincoln, these figures would have been disgusted by these developments. Reagan and a Republican Senate famously granted nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants permanent status not 40 years ago. Now, the GOP would just as soon send troops into American streets to round up those folks that their standard-bearer once gave a chance to. For shame.

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