Five years ago, Kris Kobach, Kansas former secretary of state, announced on Fox Business Network that, in order to quickly deport undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, the Trump administration would need camps.

Or, as he also put it, processing towns.

The U.S. government owns thousands of empty mobile home trailers, Kobach told host Lou Dobbs , and it should deploy them to border cities and create processing towns that are confined. People who cross the border seeking refuge in the United States, he said, should be detained there until their claims are rejected, then promptly expelled from the country.

Kobach, then the general counsel of a private border wall-building effort two former leaders of which later went to prison for defrauding donors was a lonely voice at the time. But in the years since, the Trump wing of the Republican Party has come around to his point of view.

Key allies and advisers arent mincing their words: In order to carry out Trumps mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.

The mass deportation operation will be a bloody story, Trump said last weekend . And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.

The camps will be built on open land in Texas near the border and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States current immigrant detention capacity , Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trumps White House, said last year . In multiple interviews , Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be greater than any national infrastructure project in American history.

Trump comes back in January Ill be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen, Thomas Homan , who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said in July at a conference for Trump-aligned conservatives.

They aint seen shit yet, Homan said. Wait until 2025.

Eisenhower 2.0

Trump himself, as usual, has stayed away from the details of his plan to deport more than 10 million people, and his campaign didnt respond to HuffPosts questions about specific policies.

Instead, the campaigns national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement: President Trump will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the worlds criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.

Trump has frequently invoked former President Dwight D. Eisenhower whose administration infamously oversaw a massive, deadly deportation program named after a slur, Operation Wetback as a model.

That program, launched in 1954 to push undocumented migrants into Mexico, has been a Trump hobbyhorse for years. In 2016, CNN s Jake Tapper pressed Trump to respond to critics who called it a shameful chapter in American history; Trump countered by saying, Some people think it was a very effective chapter.

Eisenhower did a massive deportation of people, Trump told Time in April this year. He got very proficient at it.

Eisenhowers deportation effort resulted in the expulsion of more than 1 million people, according to a government report. That tally is likely exaggerated , though, and includes a significant number of people who today might be said to have self-deported that is, they left the country on their own rather than face arrest or deal with court proceedings.

Government records detail a militaristic operation using trucks, jeeps and planes. The government conducted naval deportations on cargo ships that a congressional investigation later compared to cramped slave ships and which led to highly publicized drownings . Law enforcement agencies, from local police up to the federal Border Patrol, pitched in on mass sweeps of industrial areas and immigrant-dense neighborhoods.

Press clippings from the time noted numerous camps were used to house people awaiting deportation. The Los Angeles Times described one such concentration camp as a wire-fenced security camp capable of holding 1,000 people in Elysian Park. Within a few years, the same area would host Dodger Stadium. Subsequent coverage included a photo of a 10-month-old in her mothers arms youngest internee, the caption reads and a 1-year-old American citizen being deported along with his family. Other stories referred to human freight being shipped back to Mexico.

I have seen mothers deport[ed] and leave on this side their nursing babies, one South Texas resident reportedly wrote to the attorney general . What is wrong with this country any way?

The nature of immigration, and immigration law, was much different in the 50s , when the U.S.-Mexico border was more porous and seasonal migration was common. But Trump and the modern Republican Party have embraced the Eisenhower operations purge of immigrants: At the Republican National Convention, scores of people held up Mass Deportation Now! signs distributed by organizers, and this years GOP platform promises the largest deportation operation in American history.