TRUMP'S INAUGURATION

WHAT TO EXPECT ON DON'S FIRST DAY IN OFFICE

- T K VINEETH @Kochi

ONALD Trump is all set to hit the ground running by signing a flurry of sweeping executive orders on his first day as the 47th President of the United States. Policy experts and lawyers in his team are reportedly ready with the drafts of a plethora of orders to be signed by him on January 20, when he will legally take charge as president.

The most disruptive among the first batch of orders to be inked is the fiat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in the US. The drastic plan, reiterated by Trump multiple times and confirmed by incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as recently as last week, envisages "the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in American history". The proposed action would dwarf the so-called Mexican Repatriation executed during the Great Depression in the 1930s by the then president, Herbert Hoover, when nearly 2 million people of Mexican descent, half of them born in the US, were rounded up and driven out. If Hoover then blamed the immigrants for the economic downturn that set off severe unemployment and poverty, Trump now associates the undocumented with rising crimes and social unrest in the country.