Trump Says He Wants To Use Military For Deportations, Which Is TOTALLY NEW INFORMATION
It would be shocking if he hadn't said these things out loud a whole bunch of times.
In a 4:00 a.m. “Truth,” Donald Trump, who married two immigrants, and who’s had undocumented immigrants build his buildings, and scrub the skidmarks off his underpants at his clubs, three-exclamation-points squealed that he wants to MAKE EMERGENCY to use the military to carry out his mass deportation plans.
Tom Fitton: 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: TRUE!!!
But is it a thing he can do? There’s a whole lot of legal and practical issues, here. And we do still have laws.
Incoming President Treasonballs has said in rallies that he plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the president to detain, relocate, or deport non-citizens from a country considered an enemy of the US during wartime. But the US is not “at war” with anybody right now. “Drug cartels” are not a country. Is Trump going to declare “war” against every single country that immigrants arrive from? Declare war on Mexico and China? Mmmkay.
He has also said he would declare a “national emergency,” but declaring the emergency and getting the funding to do whatever thing are not the same. Congress appropriates the money. As you might recall, Trump tried that last term over funding for his stupid border wall, and even shut down the government over it. Sixteen states and the ACLU representing the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition sued, and lawsuits worked their way through the courts during his entire term, with Trump losing all over. Eventually the Supreme Court let him have money for his dumb wall because, they said, the Sierra Club did not have standing to sue, but the issue of if the president can overrule Congress to emergency-spend however much money on what he wants was never settled, and was moot after Joe Biden took over and canceled the stupid wall.
Fun fact, by the way: Biden and Obama actually deported more people than Trump ever did.
But let’s say that That Man prevails and SCOTUS says sure, the president can executive-decide to emergency-spend the entire military budget going after students who overstayed their visas (like, ahem, Elon, allegedly), workers picking grapes and home-health aides cleaning out Nana’s bedpan. Or Congress says okay, here’s $100 billion a year, sure, we’ll cut the Defense budget for this. There’s still not enough people to do it.
The US has an estimated 11 to 13 million undocumented immigrants, about 3.3 percent of the population. And it’s not like there’s some national registry of them. There’s 443,543 members of the National Guard, and they would have to go door to door, to every home and workplace in the country, checking papers. States deploy the National Guard. Florida and Texas might be yeehaw for this plan, but blue states sure as fuck are not. Hair Club dropout Stephen Miller’s answer to this is to pull “10 to 11,000 guns and badges” from agencies like the DEA, the ATF, the FBI, and even the National Park Service to do nothing but deportations. So, gut these agencies and let everybody have a free-for-all on all the drugs, guns and poaching all the spotted owls they can carry to go after abuelas? Sure, Steve.
Miller’s other big brain plan, which he explained on Charlie Kirk’s podcast: “You go to the red state governors and you say, ‘give us your National Guard, 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.”
So, state-by-state civil war, with Glenn Youngkin’s National Guard fighting Wes Moore’s National Guard on the streets of Baltimore over the cleaning ladies, construction workers and line cooks in the kitchen of Holy Frijoles, and Hopkins grads who overstayed their visas? Probably not legal, and even by Stephen Miller standards, that’s one wild fantasy.
Florida would lose five percent of its population, about a million people. About 14 percent of workers in the construction industry are undocumented, immigrants are about 16 percent of all nurses, and about one-third of the workers providing care to the elderly and disabled.
And then there’s how even if Stephen Miller could snap his bony little claws and make 11 million undocumented immigrants vanish for free, somehow, the US would starve. Even if he only got rid of the workers in the San Joaquin Valley, there are not enough Americans who will pick peaches in 100-degree heat for 14 hours a day, not even for $50 an hour, not even if you put every prisoner and child to work. Do you like food? This plan is not for you.
There’s how there are not enough courtrooms or judges, and asylum claims are still the law, even if ICE director Tom “deport families together” Homan or dog-shooting Kristi Noem wishes it otherwise. There’s no nodding your head to I-Dream-of-Jeannie-executive-order away birthright citizenship.
Hey, did you know Donald Trump actually released thousands of actual criminals and hundreds of murderers so his thugs could focus on asylum seekers instead? Mass-deportation is the opposite of selective deportation.
This mass-deportation bonerdream may be of the pipe variety, but it is still all scary stuff. He will sure get some money to do bad things. Maybe Congress will actually pass the border bill that he killed and he will pretend like it’s his idea? And there’ll be more raids and some cages of kids as a treat for Miller. For sure there will be a lot of cruelty, a lot of terror (which immigrant communities are already feeling) and human trauma.
And it’s the end of America as the good guys, or at least the better guys in this world. It sucks. Hug your local immigrant today.
[NYTimes / Mother Jones / CNN]
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I'm going to stop comparing the president-elect to Hitler.
He's way more like Stalin.
He wants to destroy the military by purging anyone who disagrees with him
He wants to destroy the economy by imposing illogical and impractical economic beliefs
He wants to banish productive members of society for their ethnicity and economic status
He wants to banish members of society who disagree with him
He wants to impose unscientific theories, violently if necessary (see Lysenkoism)
He wants to keep the members of his team incompetent, paranoid, and wholly devoted to him and his whims
The more I think about it, the scarier the match is.
Oh, and he also seems to love Mother Russia. There's that.
When the leopards eating faces party looks up at the Democrats and says save us from the leopards eating our faces…I’m going to whisper back, “no”.