Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, made his usual promise at a rally in Reno Nevada, Nevada on December 12: To treat immigration like the United States was at war. He accused President Joe Biden launching a “military invader” against the United States, by allowing “drugs and criminals, gangs and terrorists” to enter the US-Mexico Border. He vowed not to allow any terrorists, criminals, gang members or drugs to cross the US-Mexico border.
[[{“value”:”Republican front-runner Donald Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to treat immigration as if the United States were at war at a rally in Reno, Nevada, in December. He claimed that by allowing “drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists” to cross the US-Mexico border, President Joe Biden had started a “military invasion” against the United States. In response to President Eisenhower’s slur,” Operation Wetback,” he vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation in National history.” And he pledged to” clean up” the nation, which has become a “dumping ground” and” safe haven for bloodthirsty criminals” as well as” savage gang members.”
Trump’s exponential anti-immigrant rhetoric and threats to deport millions of illegal immigrants are nothing new. Trump ran on it in 2016 and finally, on the advice of hardliner Stephen Miller, put some of the strictest immigration laws in new memory into effect during his second term in office.
However, as a defeated GOP candidate, Gov. According to Ron DeSantis, Trump ultimately deported fewer people than Barack Obama, who was known as the” Deporter-in-Chief.” Trump is then pledging to go one step further by promising to arm the entire government against immigrants.
That entails breaking his primary term’s” Promise Broken” to expel all illegal immigrants from the nation. Deportations would start on Inauguration Day, according to Miller, the founder and leader of the “anti-woke” America First Legal group, who announced this on X. According to Miller, the anti-immigrant agenda will” commence immediately and it will be jubilant, beautiful, and everything you want it to be” if President Trump returns to the Oval office in January, according to Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
Even though some of Trump and Miller’s ideas may seem absurd, improbable, or at the very least likely to face legal opposition, they should n’t be disregarded, especially in light of a Supreme Court ruling from 2022 that could obstruct lawsuits challenging the enforcement of illegal immigration.
Here’s how a second Trump presidency would go about carrying out large-scale deportations and what, according to immigration experts and original officials, would happen if such plans were put forth by the president.
cite the Alien Enemies Act
What Trump and Miller claim they would do: The Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute that was included in the notorious 1798 Lien and Sedition Acts, gave the president the authority to detain, relocate, or deport adult citizens of angry countries who were at least 14 years old. ( How to define such a nation is unclear, but it essentially refers to circumstances where there has been an” a declared war” between the United States and any foreign country or government, as well as any “invasion or predatory incursion” against American territory. It was used to hold German, Italian, and Japanese citizens during World War II.
A second Trump administration would argue that gangs and drug cartels in Latin American nations have attained the status of” state actors” and are “engaged in an invasion on behalf of foreign narco-states,” as Rolling Stone recently reported. According to Miller, using the Alien Enemies Act would enable them to” suspend the due process that typically applies to a removal proceeding.”
In the event of a conflict between China and the United States, George Fishman, the deputy public counsel for the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, suggested that one advantage of using the Alien Enemies Act would be the deportation of many students. Trump’s plan to allege an invasion by drug cartels and gangs faces “very major roadblocks,” he added.
The Alien Enemies Act ca n’t be used as a simple tool for immigration enforcement, according to experts. That is a very stupid idea, declares policy director at the American Immigration Council Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Yet Trump’s most traditional Federalist Society appointees would chuckle about it in court.
The United States is not already engaged in a declared war or being invaded by another country, despite what conservative politicians like to claim then. The Alien Enemies Act only applies to certain nations, according to Reichlin-Melnick, even if that were n’t the case. You cannot just claim that “drugs” are invading our nation and then demand that all drug dealers be deported because “dies” is never a nation,” he claims. ” You would have to effectively declare that the United States is being invaded by dozens of nations around the world by making a declaration about every one nation from which those people come.” That would subsequently lead to numerous political problems and, in essence, a “massive unusual relations nightmare.”
the final outcome? Some of these nations that actively work with the US to control border flows might stop doing therefore, which could result in an increase in the flow of drugs and immigrants.
Socioeconomic costs would also be involved. According to ManoLasya Perepa, policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association ( AILA ), the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement ( USMCA, which replaced NAFTA in 2020 ), has resulted in lucrative trade agreements between Canada and Mexico. ” Declaring war on one of its two major trading partners will undoubtedly have a negative impact on American businesses and citizens.”
Additionally, Perepa claims that using the Alien Enemies Act to declare war on Latin American nations would strengthen immigration’s claims for asylum “because a Trump administration would give credibility to]claims that ] cartels and gangs are the government in these countries.”
Additionally, experts claim that ignoring the proper procedure in removal proceedings for immigrants from particular nations would not be able to withstand legal challenges claiming discrimination based on federal origin. According to Perepa,” There is a wealth of case law indicating its unconstitutionality.”
However, a Supreme Court ruling that forbids national judges from issuing injunctions that obstruct illegal immigration policies as the cases progress through the legal system has been very significant. According to Reichlin-Melnick,” the courts will be a drastically more constrained check on his immigration enforcement actions in the second term than they were the second.”
Call in state and local law enforcement, mobilize the US military, and deploy personnel from different federal agencies.
When asked how the mass deportations project would be carried out by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show, Trump and Miller responded that it would require a” switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller outlined visiting all locations where “illegals” are known to congregate and transporting individuals to provincial detention. He explained that a significant increase in personnel would be required to achieve that. Miller then suggested obtaining “badges” from the US military and local law enforcement (especially sheriffs ) in addition to “pulling”” 10 to 11, 000 guns and badges,” from a variety of places, including Homeland Security Investigations ( HIS), the DEA, the ATF, and even National Park Service, to carry out large-scale deportations across the nation.
According to experts, there are already “more than 8, 7000 employees that,” according to Jennifer Ibaez Whitlock, regulatory policy and practice counsel for AILA, “make up HSI, the investigative arm of DHS.” This concept would effectively eliminate the entire workforce.
According to Miller’s theory, immigration enforcement would be given priority over all other objectives of law enforcement, such as halting organized crime, preventing terrorism, and preserving peace in national parks. We do n’t care that a pedophile is pursuing your child, says Reichlin-Melnick; instead, we need to pursue an undocumented grandma who has been living here for 30 years.
The obvious question of what happens to the work they are being taken away from is even raised when personnel from various federal agencies are deputized. National drug trafficking prosecutions decreased during the time the Trump administration separated immigrant families at the border as a result of the zero-tolerance policy that prosecuted border crossers. Reichlin Melnick adds,” You’re talking about a free-for-all on crime for everything otherwise when all your resources are concentrated on illegal immigrants.
Additionally, there are obvious risks associated with asking agents to perform tasks for which they are unprepared. According to Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service ( INS ) under Bill Clinton, relying on untrained agents to enforce immigration law would result in significant violations of civil rights, lead to racial profiling, and sweep up a sizable portion of US citizens who are not required to carry any documents that prove they are legally in the country. Meissner continues,” This kind of agenda ultimately perpetuates” sharp swings and [an ] inability as a nation to settle into an immigration system that is modern, up to date, and reflects laws that are in our national interest.
Send the National Guard to enforce immigration.
You go to the purple state governors and you say, give us your National Guard, Miller said on Kirk’s podcast. That is what Trump and Miller say they would do. The Virginia National Guard will detain illegal aliens in Virginia, and the Alabama N Guard in Alabama will appoint them as immigration enforcement officers. And if you’re going to enter a hostile state like Maryland, also, Virginia would simply carry out the arrest that, right, very close, and very nearby.
According to experts, the Posse Comitatus Act typically prohibits the US military, including the National Guard, from carrying out home law enforcement. Miller claimed that the Trump administration would circumvent this by using the Insurrection Act to permit the use of federal troops to detain immigrants, according to The New York Times. National troops were sent to the Southern border by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, but they were only used for operational and logistical purposes. Trump and Miller would thus need to override the Department of Defense’s interpretation of the Posse Comitatus Act in order to deploy the National Guard for immigration enforcement purposes, according to Reichlin-Melnick.
According to Whitlock, Mr. Miller would have militarized checkpoints at state borders to detain and arrest people who might not have the proper immigration papers in this America rather than a” Maryland Welcomes You” sign at the border between Virginia and Maryland. Whether they are deputized or no, the National Guard is not equipped to assess someone’s immigration status immediately, much less decide whether they qualify for US citizenship. Our economies and communities would be severely disrupted by this strategy, which would almost definitely result in racial profiling and a plethora of individual case lawsuits on behalf of US citizens who had been wrongfully detained. Additionally, it appears that there is no consideration given to the millions of mixed-race families, including young US citizens, who reside in the interior and would be torn off by these widespread raids.
” Build large staging” output “facilities near border infrastructure to carry out removals”
What Trump and Miller promise to do: Miller stated that the Trump administration would construct sizable holding facilities that could hold between 50 000 and 70 000 people at any given time in order to detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations. Like a project would be bigger than any federal infrastructure project we’ve ever undertaken, he said.
Miller even suggested scheduling regular deportation flights to China, India, and the nations of the Northern Triangle on various days. In this manner, “you’re getting people who’ve been around for various lengths of time,” he said on a podcast.” When their case ends, whether it’s in an hour or two, there’ll be an airplane available, fueled, and prepared to take them home.”
According to experts,” Building a facility like Miller describes is reminiscent of Stalin’s construction of his gulags, and would be contrary to American values,” according to Amy Grenier, the policy and practice counsel of the AILA.
However, it is n’t impossible. To briefly house immigrant families, the Trump administration constructed tent cities close to the border. The Biden administration began detaining thousands of unaccompanied minors at a temporary shelter at Fort Bliss, an Army outpost in Texas, in 2021. According to a watchdog report, migrants “experienced distress, anxiety, and in some cases, panic attacks” due to problems with the case management of children and prompt release.
People are going to die, according to Reichlin- Melnick,” If you throw up a bunch of tents in the border and shove 50, 000 people in them.”
Miller seems to ignore the latest reality when flying. According to Yael Schacher, an immigration historian and director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, there are now numerous deportation flights to Northern Triangle nations under the Biden administration; 36 flights were made to Guatemala between January 1 and 21. However, a large number of people are traveling from different nations, and many of these nations are likely to reject an increase in deportation flights unless President Trump offers them something in return. As they have done since the previous Trump administration,” China” continues to reject airplanes, according to Schacher. How Trump will compel China to accept people is unknown to me.
Nevertheless, according to Reichlin-Melnick, Trump and Miller’s plan “ignores the actual laws, the resource challenges, and the important public opposition if they really started trying to do any of this.””}]] GOP frontrunner Donald Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to treat immigration as if the United States were at war at a rally in Reno, Nevada, in December. He claimed that by allowing “drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists” to cross the US-Mexico border, President Joe Biden had started a “military invasion” against the United States. To, he vowed
Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, made his usual promise at a rally in Reno Nevada, Nevada on December 12: To treat immigration like the United States was at war. He accused President Joe Biden launching a “military invader” against the United States, by allowing “drugs and criminals, gangs and terrorists” to enter the US-Mexico Border. He vowed not to allow any terrorists, criminals, gang members or drugs to cross the US-Mexico border.
Mother Jones illustration; Shannon Stapleton/EFE/ZUMA; Hal Gatewood/Unsplash. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.. At a December rally in Reno, Nevada, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump made his regular promise: To treat immigration as if the United States is at war. He accused President Joe Biden of launching a “military invasion” against the United States by allowing “drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists” to cross the US-Mexico border. He vowed to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history,” inspired by President Eisenhower’s slur-named “Operation Wetback.” And he promised to “clean up” the country, which has turned into a “dumping ground” and “safe haven for blood thirsty criminals [and] savage gang members.”. Trump’s hyperbolic anti-immigrant language and pledges to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is hardly new. He ran on it back in 2016 and then, advisedby hardliner Stephen Miller, in his first term Trump implemented some of the most draconian immigration policies in recent memory.. Still, as failed GOP contender Gov. Ron DeSantis noted, Trump ultimately deported fewer people than his predecessor Barack Obama (who was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief“). Now, Trump is vowing to take a step further: promising to weaponize the full force of government against immigrants.. That means doubling down on a “Promise Broken” from his first term to remove all undocumented immigrants from the country. Deportations—as Miller, the founder and president of the “anti-woke” America First Legal group, has declared on X—would begin on Inauguration Day. “If President Trump is back in the Oval office in January,” Miller told Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, the anti-immigrant agenda will “commence immediately and it will be joyous and it will be wonderful and it will be everything you want it to be.”. Some of Trump and Miller’s proposals may sound bizarre, far-fetched, or at least bound to draw legal challenges, but they shouldn’t be dismissed either—especially in light of a 2022 Supreme Court decision that could hinder lawsuits challenging unlawful immigration enforcement policies.. Here’s how a second Trump presidency would go about conducting mass deportations and what immigration experts and former officials say would occur if these plans were attempted by a presidential administration.. Invoke the Alien Enemies Act. What Trump and Miller say they would do: A wartime statute that was part of the infamous 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act authorized the president to detain, relocate, or deport male citizens, 14 or older, of hostile nations. (How to define such a country is complex, but basically it refers to situations where this is “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion” that has been done “against the territory of the United States.”) During World War II, it was used to detain citizens of Germany, Italy, and Japan.. As Rolling Stone recently reported, a second Trump administration would make the argument that gangs and drug cartels in Latin American countries have risen to the level of “state actors” and are “engaged in an invasion on behalf of foreign narco-states.” Invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Miller has said, would allow them to “suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”. George Fishman, who served as Department of Homeland Security’s deputy general counsel during the Trump administration, suggested one of the benefits of invoking the Alien Enemies Act would be to deport large numbers of students from China in case of a war between both countries. (He also acknowledged that there are “very serious roadblocks” to Trump’s plan of claiming an invasion by drug cartels and gangs.). What experts say would happen: The Alien Enemies Act can’t be simply used as a basic immigration enforcement tool. “That is a ridiculously dumb idea,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “It is something that even the most conservative Federalist Society Trump appointees would laugh out of court.”. As much as conservative politicians like to claim otherwise, the United States isn’t currently in a declared war or under a foreign invasion. Even if that were not the case, Reichlin-Melnick explains, the Alien Enemies Act applies to specific countries. “You cannot simply say we are being invaded by ‘drugs’ and then call for all drug dealers to be deported because ‘drugs’ is not a country,” he says. “You would have to essentially make a declaration as to every single country that those people come from—effectively declaring that the United States is being invaded by dozens of countries around the world.” That would in turn create all sorts of diplomatic issues and essentially a “massive foreign relations nightmare.”. The end result? Some of these countries that actively cooperate with the United States in managing border flows might stop doing so, potentially leading to more drugs and migrants coming through.. There would also be economic costs. “The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, which replaced NAFTA in 2020) has led to profitable trade agreements between Canada and Mexico,” says ManoLasya Perepa, policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). “Declaring war on one of its two major trading partners will surely negatively affect businesses and the people of the United States.”. In addition, declaring war against Latin American countries to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, Perepa explains, would have the effect of strengthening the asylum claims from migrants “because a Trump administration would give credibility to [claims that] cartels and gangs are the government in these countries.”. Experts also say ignoring due process in removal proceedings for immigrants from certain countries would not survive court challenges alleging discrimination based on national origin. “There is a wealth of case law indicating its unconstitutionality,” says Perepa.. Still, a Supreme Court decision preventing federal judges from issuing injunctions blocking unlawful immigration policies as the cases work their way through the legal system is a massive sea change. “The courts will be a significantly more limited check on his immigration enforcement actions in the second term than they were in the first term,” says Reichlin-Melnick.. Deploy personnel from other federal agencies, mobilize the US military, and call in state and local law enforcement. What Trump and Miller say they would do: When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. To accomplish that, there would need to be a massive increase in personnel, he explained. Miller then proposed pulling “10 to 11,000 guns and badges” from a myriad of places: Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), the DEA, the ATF, the FBI, and even National Park Service law enforcement, in addition to gathering “badges’ from the US military and local law enforcement (particularly sheriffs) to carry out large-scale deportations across the country.. What experts say would happen: Right now, there are “currently more than 8,7000 employees that” makeup HSI, the investigative arm of DHS, AILA’s supervisory policy and practice counsel Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock explains. “This idea would essentially gut the entire workforce.”. Under Miller’s idea, all the various goals of law enforcement—stopping terrorism, disrupting organized crime, maintaining calm at national parks—would be put aside for immigration enforcement. “What you’d be telling the American public is we don’t care that a pedophile is going after your child,” says Reichlin-Melnick, “we need to go after a grandma who’s been here for 30 years undocumented.”. Deputizing personnel from other federal agencies also raises the obvious question: What happens to the work they are being pulled away from? During the period when the Trump administration separated migrant families at the border under the zero-tolerance policy that prosecuted border crossers, federal drug trafficking prosecutions plummeted. “You’re talking about a free-for-all all on crime for everything else when you’re spending all your resources only focused on undocumented immigrants,” Reichlin-Melnick adds.. Then there are also clear pitfalls of asking agents to do work for which they are not prepared. Relying on untrained agents to enforce immigration law, says Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under Bill Clinton, “would generate enormous violations of civil rights, create [racial] profiling, and sweep up large numbers of US citizens who are not required to carry any documents that prove they are properly in the country.” This kind of agenda, Meissner adds, ultimately perpetuates “sharp swings and [an] inability as a country to settle into an immigration system that is up to date and modernized and reflects laws that are in our national interest.”. Deputize the National Guard for immigration enforcement. What Trump and Miller say they would do: “You go to the red state governors and you say, give us your National Guard,” Miller explained on Kirk’s podcast. “We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers…the Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia. And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby.”. What experts say would happen: The Posse Comitatus Act generally bars the US military, including the National Guard, from engaging in domestic law enforcement. (The New York Times reported Miller saying that the Trump administration would get around this by invoking the Insurrection Act to allow the use of federal troops to arrest migrants.) The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations all deployed federal troops to the Southern border, but they were limited to logistical and administrative roles. To deploy the National Guard for immigration enforcement purposes, Reichlin-Melnick explains, Trump and Miller would therefore have to override the Department of Defense’s interpretation of the Posse Comitatus Act.. “In this America, instead of a ‘Maryland Welcomes You’ sign at the border of Virginia and Maryland, Mr. Miller would have militarized checkpoints at state borders to detain and arrest individuals who may not have the right immigration papers,” says Whitlock. “Deputized or not, the National Guard is not trained to conduct an evaluation of someone’s immigration status on the spot, let alone adjudicate claims to US citizenship. This tactic would prove highly disruptive to our economies and communities, almost certainly lead to racial profiling, and bring about a host of individual case litigation on behalf of wrongfully detained US citizens. There also seems to be zero consideration for the millions of mixed-status families, including minor US citizen children, living in the interior who would be split apart by these mass raids.”. Build massive staging “output” facilities near border infrastructure to carry out removals. What Trump and Miller say they would do: To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”. Miller also suggested having weekly deportation flights on different days to places like the Northern Triangle countries, India, or China. “That way, as you’re getting people who’ve been here for different lengths of time,” he said on a podcast, “when their case ends, whether it be in an hour or a week, when it ends, there’ll be a plane ready and fueled up and ready to take them home.”. What experts say would happen: “Building a facility like Miller describes is reminiscent of Stalin’s building of his gulags,” Amy Grenier, AILA’s policy and practice counsel, says, “and would be antithetical to American values.”. But it isn’t impossible. The Trump administration built tent cities close to the border to temporarily detain migrant families. In 2021, the Biden administration started holding thousands of unaccompanied minors at a makeshift shelter at Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. Issues with the case management of children and timely release led migrants to “experience distress, anxiety, and in some cases, panic attacks,” according to a watchdog report.. “If you throw together a bunch of tents in the border and shove 50,000 people in them,” Reichlin-Melnick says, “people are going to die.”. On flights, Miller seems to ignore the current reality. “There are already, under the Biden administration, frequent deportation flights to Northern Triangle countries—there were 36 flights to Guatemala between January 1 and 21,” says Yael Schacher, immigration historian and director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “But so many people are coming from other countries—and many [countries] will likely refuse to accept an increased number of deportation flights unless President Trump gives them something in exchange.” China “still refuses to accept planes,” Schacher notes, as they have since the last Trump administration. “I don’t know how Trump will force China to take people.”. Overall, Reichlin-Melnick says, Trump and Miller’s plan “ignores the actual laws, the resource challenges, and the significant public opposition if they actually started trying to do any of this.”
