Donald Trump, the president-elect, announced Monday that the military and a declaration of national emergency will be used in his plan to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants in the United States.
Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative legal organisation Judicial Watch, posted on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social on November 8th, saying: “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Trump responded early Monday: “TRUE!!!”
Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded in a statement when asked for further details of the plan, saying, “President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and other immigrant advocates have stated that they are ready to take legal action in response.
There is no national emergency authority that allows the United States to carry out deportations, warned Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior scholar at the left-leaning American Immigration Council.
By claiming a national emergency during his first term, Trump circumvented Congress to redirect Pentagon cash to build the border wall. Shortly after taking office in 2021, President Biden ended the emergency order.
According to Reichlin-Melnick, Donald Trump’s reaction to Fitton’s post does not imply that American military forces will be sent in to conduct deportations. Although they haven’t been directly involved in capturing migrants, troops have previously been utilised to bolster logistics at the border.
“This is how I remember the last four years of the Trump administration—they say a lot, but the actual policy often looks very different when it is implemented,” he remarked.
According to Reichlin-Melnick, Trump and his supporters have confused the conversation about newly arriving immigrants with the larger group of long-term undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s mass deportation plan could be hampered by the fact that anyone who was allowed entry into the country by border officials within the last four years is already subject to removal proceedings and cannot be removed until those proceedings are finished, which can take years. There are a record 1.5 million pending asylum cases in immigration courts as of last month.