Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump\u2019s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military.<\/p>\n
Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes \u2014 ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was obsessed with having the military involved,\u201d said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.<\/p>\n
That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination. The former president is making immigration a core campaign theme, promoting a proposal for an unprecedented deportation effort if he is returned to power.<\/p>\n
Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch \u201cthe largest domestic deportation operation in American history.\u201d As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as \u201cOperation Wetback,\u201d using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space \u2014 a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmericans can expect that immediately upon President Trump\u2019s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world\u2019s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,\u201d said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. She added that undocumented immigrants \u201cshould not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has made similar promises and has used inflammatory smears since his 2016 campaign. But he, his aides and allies say a second turn in office would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term, former officials said, Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.<\/p>\n
Throughout his current campaign, the former president has exerted his influence on the immigration policy debate on several fronts. He pressured congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan compromise to expand enforcement funding and powers, arguing that it would give the Democrats a political victory and that it was not restrictive enough. He has also escalated his use of dehumanizing language to describe migrants, accusing them of \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country\u201d and calling the record unauthorized border crossings an \u201cinvasion,\u201d an \u201copen wound\u201d and a source of imminent terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
But his deportation proposal is one part of his emerging platform that experts, current and former government officials and others described as especially alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?\u201d said Jason Houser, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u2019s chief of staff from January 2022 until March 2023. \u201cAre you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That\u2019s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, \u201cTheir ideas were psychotic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s aides are encouraged by polls showing voters prioritizing immigration and trusting him more than President Biden on the issue. But there is some disagreement in his circles on the specifics.<\/p>\n
While advisers agree on border security, building a wall on the southern border and deporting migrants who have committed crimes after entering the country as winning political issues, one adviser expressed concern that promising to deport massive numbers of people who haven\u2019t been convicted of a crime could hurt Trump in a general election campaign. Trump\u2019s language and proposals are already under heavy criticism from the Biden campaign, as well as pro-immigration and civil liberties groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump is following the 20th century dictator\u2019s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state,\u201d Genevieve Nadeau, a former DHS lawyer, said in a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy. \u201cHe\u2019s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven\u2019t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign has also said he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States. The idea of challenging the 14th Amendment\u2019s guarantee of birthright citizenship would be sure to draw a court challenge. The proposal has been raised by Trump and Miller before, but the specific promise of an executive order indicated the campaign has put further effort into fleshing it out.<\/p>\n
Some in the Trump campaign have tried to tamp down talk of mass deportations and have become frustrated with some outside allies, the Trump adviser said. But another person close to the campaign said Trump and his team remain in touch with Miller, who has described \u201clarge-scale raids\u201d and \u201cthroughput facilities.\u201d Trump advisers view Miller as the leading authority on \u201cAmerica First\u201d immigration policy, and he is widely expected to reenter the West Wing if Trump wins in November.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care what the hell happens in this world,\u201d Miller said on a Feb. 5 podcast interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. \u201cIf President Trump gets reelected, the border\u2019s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Republicans frustrated with Biden have increasingly promoted the idea of militarized immigration enforcement. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers to stop crossings along the Rio Grande, where he announced plans Friday to build a military base to house the troops.<\/p>\n
Trump and his campaign have offered few details about how he would implement his deportation operation, other than to \u201cuse all necessary federal, state, local and military resources.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pool of potential deportees is large. There are about 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status, according to the most recent estimates. Nearly 7 million of those are known to ICE, which maintains a vast database of people eligible for deportation whose asylum claims and immigration cases are still pending.<\/p>\n
A smaller subset of that caseload \u2014 about 1.3 million people \u2014 remain in the United States despite having received a deportation order from an immigration judge. These potential deportees, if taken into custody, are the easiest for the government to send home, because they have already received due process. But ICE often doesn\u2019t know where they are.<\/p>\n
Beyond those challenges, there are other major logistical and operational obstacles to the kind of mass deportations Trump has promised. The first is available personnel: ICE only has about 6,000 deportation officers nationwide. The amount of time it takes to recruit, hire, screen and train a new deportation officer is about two years, according to current and former ICE officials.<\/p>\n
Detention space is also squeezed. The Biden administration is using about 38,000 beds at immigration jails and other facilities that hold migrants awaiting deportation. During the Trump years, the number exceeded 50,000, but never reached the kinds of capacity levels necessary for the kind of mega-deportation system Trump envisions.<\/p>\n
Some ICE officials said the agency could find more available beds in county jails. But Trump surrogates have gone further, suggesting they would put migrants in \u201ccamps\u201d or \u201ctents.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids, you have to have somewhere to put them,\u201d Miller said in a November podcast interview with Kirk. \u201cSo you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly \u2014 probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets \u2014 and that\u2019s how you\u2019re able to scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller also suggested using National Guard troops, state police and other federal law enforcement agencies as force multipliers, even sending National Guard troops from Republican-led states into neighboring states governed by Democrats. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, they would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland,\u201d he said in the November podcast interview.<\/p>\n
Such street-level roundups are so resource-intensive that many ICE officials view them as impractical. The operations require officers to locate migrants and surveil them to determine a safe opportunity to make an arrest. Such arrests often depend on the cooperation of local police.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most crucial part of any law enforcement effort is not to undermine popular support for that effort, and that means doing it legally, doing it respectfully and doing it properly,\u201d said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is now at the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks tighter restrictions.<\/p>\n
To arrest and deport families with children, the preparations are even more time-consuming. An operation targeting 20 to 30 families for arrest takes two to three weeks of planning, said Houser, the former ICE chief of staff. For ICE to reach a target of 300,000 to 500,000 deportations per year \u2014 a far more modest goal than Trump\u2019s \u2014 Houser said the agency would need two to three times as many deportation officers as ICE has.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re talking about building a major logistics apparatus that would still have to meet court and legal requirements for health care and child care,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
ICE officers and staff are burned out by the pace and intensity of their work over the past several years, according to a veteran DHS official who was not authorized to speak to reporters. For other law enforcement agencies, the drain on their resources would come at the expense of other legitimate priorities, the former DHS official said, and the operation would have to be continuous to deter new arrivals.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels shortsighted, stupid and an enormous waste of money,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n
Another problem is so-called \u201crecalcitrant countries\u201d that limit or refuse to take back deportees. Nations such as Venezuela and Cuba are already under U.S. economic sanctions, leaving Washington with reduced leverage to compel them to take more deportation flights.<\/p>\n
Even other nations that remain U.S. allies in Latin America set conditions on the number of flights and deportees they\u2019re willing to accept. Passenger manifests have to be sent several days in advance. It\u2019s not as simple as loading hundreds of people into a military transport plane and dropping them off wherever the president wants.<\/p>\n
A former senior administration official said Trump would be emboldened in a second term and insist on moving faster than his first administration did. The former president has repeatedly suggested he would act as a \u201cdictator\u201d on \u201cday one\u201d to close the border \u2014 sometimes adding that he made this comment in jest.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will do that immediately,\u201d Trump said in a campaign video last year. \u201cThis invasion will not stand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s and Miller\u2019s determination to carry out mass deportations in a second term grew out of frustration with setbacks to their plans while Trump was in power.<\/p>\n
In Trump\u2019s first month as president, in 2017, a draft memo obtained by the Associated Press proposed deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to arrest undocumented immigrants throughout the interior of the country. The memo was never implemented, but Trump did sign an executive order directing ICE to detain more unauthorized immigrants, including pregnant women and people without criminal records.<\/p>\n
Trump pledged to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million people after his 2016 win but never came close to hitting those targets. At his administration\u2019s high-water mark in 2019, ICE carried out 267,258 deportations and returns, Department of Homeland Security data show.<\/p>\n
Trump officials likened the approach to \u201ctaking the shackles off,\u201d but it generated a backlash that drove more cities and jurisdictions to adopt sanctuary policies limiting their cooperation with ICE. ICE officials have long preferred to take people into custody from a secure setting such as a jail to avoid the complex planning and adverse publicity of arrests in homes, workplaces or streets.<\/p>\n
As the number of people in ICE custody jumped 22 percent in Trump\u2019s first two years, the DHS inspector general uncovered \u201cegregious violations of detention standards,\u201d including inadequate medical care, expired food, lack of recreation, moldy bathrooms and inadequate clothing and hygiene supplies. A separate inspector general\u2019s investigation found \u201cdangerous overcrowding\u201d in an El Paso facility, where a cell built for 25 people held 155.<\/p>\n
In June 2018, reporters and human rights activists toured a facility in McAllen, Tex., where children slept under foil sheets surrounded by chain-link fencing, after DHS acknowledged separating children from their parents at the border. Public outrage over an audio clip of a sobbing child forced Trump to halt the practice. DHS later identified 4,227 separated children, 3,147 of whom were reunited with their parent as of November 2023.<\/p>\n
Asked in 2023 whether he might reimpose family separation as president, Trump declined to rule it out and defended the policy. \u201cI know it sounds harsh,\u201d he said in a CNN town hall. \u201cWhen you say to a family that if you come we\u2019re going to break you up, they don\u2019t come. And we can\u2019t afford to have any more.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2019, Trump ordered pre-dawn raids targeting 2,000 families in 10 cities who had received deportation orders, over concerns from top DHS officials about lack of preparation and the effect on children. The administration also changed immigration enforcement rules to expedite deportations of people who had been in the country for less than two years, making it possible to remove them without a hearing in front of an immigration judge.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think other countries have judges that give them trials?\u201d Trump said in public remarks in 2018.<\/p>\n
As the president\u2019s top adviser on immigration matters, Miller advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act to mobilize the Department of Defense, according to the former officials. Pentagon officials balked at the idea of using military bases and planes, current and former officials recalled, citing concerns of getting mired in an open-ended commitment or compromising troop readiness.<\/p>\n
The president himself would often demand to send troops to block the border, according to the former officials. Aides would explain to Trump the lack of budget or legal authority to use the military for immigration, including a law against using the military for domestic law enforcement, according to former national security adviser John Bolton.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe couldn\u2019t care less,\u201d Bolton said.<\/p>\n
Trump was generally more focused on his signature campaign promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, according to former officials.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pressure from the White House was always more about the wall,\u201d a former senior DHS official said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really get significant pressure in the first term on deportations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, Trump would often say he wanted more deportations and listened to immigration hard-liners, led by Miller, a former senior administration official said. The biggest deterrent, the official said, was limited space to house people while they were awaiting a court proceeding and not enough judges to move the proceedings quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time the hard-liners would say, \u2018we need to start arresting them,\u2019 I would say \u2014 as I said 50 times \u2014 in order to do this, we have to make all these things happen. That was the end of any conversation,\u201d the former senior administration official said. \u201cIt\u2019s not an overnight thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller reached the conclusion that aggressive immigration enforcement had to be implemented as quickly as possible, without losing time by considering litigation risks, a former DHS official said. During Trump\u2019s first term, immigration advocates and civil liberties groups repeatedly succeeded in halting or narrowing Trump\u2019s policies through court challenges, and he could face similar challenges to a mass deportation operation.<\/p>\n
Trump has specifically cited the Eisenhower example and defended its legacy. When CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper noted in 2016 that many people considered it a \u201cshameful chapter in American history,\u201d Trump responded: \u201cSome people do, and some people think it was a very effective chapter. \u2026 It was very successful, everyone said. So I mean, that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Press reports described the operation in the summer of 1954 as \u201can all-out war\u201d with a wire-fenced \u201cconcentration camp\u201d from which Mexicans were \u201cherded aboard trains.\u201d Others were forcibly marched through miles of rattlesnake-infested deserts or had their heads shaved \u2014 ostensibly for hygienic reasons but widely viewed as humiliating, according to Garcia\u2019s research. The Red Cross intervened after many braceros, or temporary agricultural workers and laborers, were stranded in the desert, and 88 died of sunstroke, according to Columbia University historian Mae Ngai.<\/p>\n
The deportations also used planes, buses and ships, including one built for up to 90 people that was crowded with 500, leading one lawmaker to compare it to a \u201cpenal ship.\u201d The use of ships stopped after seven migrants drowned while trying to escape.<\/p>\n
The Eisenhower effort \u201cwas a one-off,\u201d Ngai said. Trump and his allies \u201care trying to figure out a way to do that in a sustained way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump\u2019s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military. Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1286,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}