Trump Confirms Plan to Use Military to Carry Out Mass Deportations

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

On Monday, Donald Trump appeared to confirm that he is willing—even eager—to declare a national emergency and use the military to carry out his plans for mass deportations.

“TRUE!!!” he wrote on social media, responding to a post suggesting that reports were circulating of the president-elect’s preparedness to go to such extreme lengths to implement his cruel immigration policies.

Trump’s desire to deport millions of undocumented immigrants can be traced to his first presidency, during which migrant families were deliberately separated and sweeping workplace raids were conducted. But as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump ultimately fell short of deporting the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Now that Trump has secured the presidency once again, this time with less guardrails and internal opposition, he’s vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As Isabela writes:

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. 

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Some of the contours of the plan already appear in motion. Last week, Trump appointed Tom Homan, the former ICE head often dubbed the “father of family separation,” as his new “border czar.”

“Mass deportation is coming,” Homan tweeted recently. “Message to every illegal alien mooching off America.”

Trump’s immigration crackdown is all but certain to go beyond mass deportations. The president-elect has made clear that he intends to tear down the country’s immigration system as we know it, by ending birthright citizenship, reviving the “Muslim Ban,” and rolling back refugee resettlement. For more on how Trump’s plan would destroy the US as we know it, read Isabela’s in-depth reporting here.