Stephen Miller, the immigration hard-liner who has been one of Donald Trump\u2019s longest-serving political advisers, tends to get worked up during his media appearances. Those appearances are generally with sympathetic (if not sycophantic) media outlets, so the combination of his energy and the lack of friction tends to bring Miller\u2019s rhetoric to unexpected places.<\/p>\n
In November, Miller joined right-wing personality Charlie Kirk for a discussion on Kirk\u2019s podcast. The title of the podcast began at 80 mph \u2014 \u201cSweeping Raids, Mass Deportations: Donald Trump\u2019s 2025 Plan to Fix the Border\u201d \u2014 and things only sped up from there.<\/p>\n
As The Washington Post detailed on Tuesday, Miller\u2019s rapid-fire delineation of how a second Trump administration would round up immigrants was largely non-practicable. The conversation had the vibe of two over-caffeinated guys sitting up late at night and talking through their fantasies; experts with whom The Post spoke suggested that, even just from a functional perspective, the ideas were not much more than that.<\/p>\n
One of Miller\u2019s theories about how things might proceed generated more than its share of attention. Trump would deploy the National Guard to round up people who are in the country illegally, he said, but would also do so in a way that reduced the guards troops\u2019 homesickness.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia,\u201d Miller said. \u201cAnd if you\u2019re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, they would just be Virginia doing the arrests in Maryland, right? Very close, very nearby.\u201d<\/p>\n
The image this presents is stark. Virginia Guard troops, presumably in military gear, driving into Maryland to effect arrests of Maryland residents? Maybe the Maryland National Guard could confront them \u2014 say, near Antietam Creek? \u2014 and the two sides could figure out how power is allocated between their states.<\/p>\n
More importantly, though, this fantasy of red-state \u2014 or, in the case of Virginia, red-governed-state \u2014 troops slipping into hostile neighboring territory makes no sense even within the context Miller offers. The simple fact of the matter is that most immigrants, including those without documentation, live in large cities, cities that are often buried deep inside blue states.<\/p>\n
The Census Bureau breaks out American urban areas into \u201cmetropolitan statistical areas,\u201d (MSAs) groupings that often mesh large and smaller areas into one cohesive region. The result looks like this in the contiguous United States.<\/p>\n
Back in 2019, Pew Research Center published an analysis showing where undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S., breaking out the data by MSA. There have obviously been more undocumented immigrants who have come to the United States since their data were compiled (in 2016), but the data nonetheless gives us a sense of how the population of undocumented immigrants is distributed around the country.<\/p>\n
In 2016, for example, more than 1 in 9 immigrants without documentation lived in or around New York City. Another 10 percent lived near Los Angeles. About 5 percent lived in the region around D.C.<\/p>\n
You can probably already see the problem. If we color each state by its 2020 vote \u2014 blue for Joe Biden, red for Trump \u2014 it\u2019s clear that the places with the most undocumented immigrants are heavily Democratic. The exceptions are Florida, Texas and (given the narrow 2020 margin) Georgia.<\/p>\n
So we come back to Miller\u2019s \u201csend in the neighboring red-state army\u201d plan. There are National Guard bases scattered around the country, some for the Army National Guard and some for the Air National Guard. Let\u2019s assume that the deployment of Miller\u2019s anti-immigrant forces begins at one of those bases and consider the city with the most undocumented immigrants, New York.<\/p>\n
The plan is, what? The Ohio National Guard suits up in Ravenna, in the northeast corner of the state, and drives in their Humvees across Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania state troopers just wave them on as they head east on the turnpike?<\/p>\n
And when they get to the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River, then what? Will they proceed on foot into Manhattan? How\u2019s that going to work?<\/p>\n
Even Chicago, which is relatively close to red-state Indiana, would hardly be easy. Imagine Indiana National Guard troops going door-to-door in South Chicago, hunting for people their intelligence suggests might be in the country illegally. This is the plan?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s before we even get to California. It\u2019s a long drive from St. George, Utah, to Los Angeles, and you know how L.A. traffic can be.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s cosplay. It\u2019s Miller feverishly imagining a world in which Trump \u2014 and by extension, he \u2014 has complete operational control over armed actors tied to the government. It\u2019s the vanity of Irvin McDowell as he marched the Union troops to Bull Run in 1861.<\/p>\n
What would happen isn\u2019t this vision of red-state shock troops blitzing into blue states to rip out immigrant families. What would happen, instead, is that deep-red states, acting with Trump\u2019s blessing and encouragement, would target populations of undocumented immigrants enough to balance the logistical headaches and expense against the political demand for punitive measures.<\/p>\n
Which, as The Post reported on Tuesday, would be disruptive and dangerous enough.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Stephen Miller, the immigration hard-liner who has been one of Donald Trump\u2019s longest-serving political advisers, tends to get worked up during his media appearances. Those appearances are generally with sympathetic (if not sycophantic) media outlets, so the combination of his energy and the lack of friction tends to bring Miller\u2019s rhetoric to unexpected places. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1360,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1359","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\/1359","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=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}