'Ugly and scary': Nobel prize winner warns Trump plan will 'spiral out of control'

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is warning that President Donald Trump's mass deportation plan is already going off the rails and will "spiral out of control" in the near future.

Writing on his Substack page, Krugman looks at how Trump's initial moves on immigration have already created chaos at farms in California where workers have stopped showing up out of fear of being deported.

Krugman notes that many Trump advisers have insisted that they are prioritizing the deportation of criminals rather than farm workers, but he doesn't believe that they have the ability to control the deportation machine that they've created.

"I don’t believe that Trump could pursue a limited, restrained crackdown on immigrants even if he wanted to," Krugman wrote. "If you incessantly make the false claim that millions of criminal migrants are fueling a vast crime wave, if you make it clear that respecting the rights of the accused is a liberal, DEI thing, of course some ICE and Border Control agents will run wild. Basically, anyone with brown skin will be at risk of at least temporary detention."

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Krugman also believes that the risks won't just come from overzealous ICE agents but also random Trump supporters who decide to take the law into their own hands and make citizen arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants.

"All of this will be ugly and scary," he warns. "America may very quickly become a nation in which everyone — or at least every nonwhite — feels the need to carry proof of legal residence with them wherever they go, and even having the right papers may not protect you from detention or vigilante violence."