Trump's Deport Everyone Wet Dream A Little Heavy On Storm Troopers For Our Taste
Sending the Indiana National Guard to invade Chicago? FUGGEDABOUTIT.
Donald Trump was running his “We have no choice” subroutine again this weekend, proclaiming that once he becomes president again, he’ll pursue even more extreme measures against immigrants than he did the first time around. That would of course include mass deportations of those without papers, regardless of how long they’ve been in the US or whether they’ve broken any laws other than not being authorized to be in the US, because that is the only law that matters. At a campaign rally, he repeated a favorite applause line yet again:
“On day one, I will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration, and we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. We have no choice.”
Trump’s Brownshirt Whisperer Steven Miller detailed how such a mass deportation program should work:
“Then, in terms of personnel, 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.”
Presumably, Chicago would be occupied by the Indiana National Guard, and so on, because we have no other choice. Sure, maybe that sounds like a recipe for civil war, but it’s not, because this time the good guys would win, and once we spend a few hundreds of billions of dollars clearing out anyone who doesn’t have their papers on them at the moment, America will be happy again, or else more heads will have to get busted.
Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice explained to PBS NewsHour that there’s even a thin shred of law to hang such an invasion upon, if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act:
“But the Insurrection Act makes the president the sole judge of whether a given situation warrants invoking the act. In other words, an insurrection is whatever the president says is an insurrection. That's why it's so important for Congress to reform the Insurrection Act to put in place safeguards against abuse, because, as things stand, there are quite literally no guardrails.”
Of course, in the nine months before the election, that may be difficult.
And as The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Brownstein argues, we shouldn’t take too much comfort from the fact that Trump never actually followed through on his first-term fantasies of deporting the 11 million or so undocumented people in the US at that time, because some of the factors that may have prevented it — particularly pushback from the less-insane GOP appointees who resisted going along — are simply not likely to hold if Trump retakes power and fills the government with loyalists. He’s not about to let any adults near the door, let alone in the room.
Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.
Brownstein notes that Miller went into quite a bit of detail on his plans when he appeared on Charlie Kirk’s Loaded Diaper Paranoid Patriot Podcast in November, explaining the general outlines of a plan to remove 10 million or so “foreign-national invaders,” because it’s not like they’re people, they’re illegal things, like cars parked in the wrong place.
It should be easy, Miller explained. First you deploy ICE agents, supplemented by red-state Guard members as needed, to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Presumably, there wouldn’t be much time or effort wasted on luxuries like due process, or even making sure they are undocumented. If some green card holders or citizens get scooped up, they shouldn’t have looked like illegal unpeople. Perhaps the Nazi term for Jews in transit to death camps — “sticks” or “pieces” — could be revived. And think what an economic boost for cattle-car manufacturers it’ll be!
Along with the raids and roundups, Miller explained, the government would build
“large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.
And yes, rightwingers on Twitter really hope some of those aircraft might just open their doors over the ocean, because they think Augusto Pinochet was a hero. Could save fuel that way, another economizing measure.
Miller explained this operation would be a challenge roughly on par with “building the Panama Canal,” and that personnel could be transferred from other federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which we suppose in a Trump administration would have little to do anyway, short of distributing guns to elementary school teachers.
Mind you, it’s just possible Miller’s fantasies don’t really consider how difficult it really would be to carry out such mass deportations. Jason Houser, a former ICE official in the Biden administration, estimated that
[r]emoving 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers[.] Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.
You say crime against humanity, Trump says jobs program!
Also too, Brownstein notes that immigration lawyers point out that every single person “would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts,” but we would add that’s merely the law now, so it’s hard to say whether it would be more than a speed bump for Trump and Miller.
As for all those red state National Guard members, even they, Houser said, might not be thrilled by the work, which would require “taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings.” Especially if local residents see them as invaders. And then there’s the courts, which may not go along, at least until they are purged.
Brownstein points out that sending red state troops to blue states to carry out mass deportations is just one way Trump has fantasized about imposing his plans on uncooperative state and local Democratic leaders.
He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.
David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and thereby already an enemy of the people, discussed with Brownstein one of the scenarios Miller laid out in his Charlie Kirk interview, asking
what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?
Well obviously, Donald Trump would do what was necessary to make America great again. He’d have no choice.
I’m thinking it would be way better to reelect Joe Biden, but I’m kind of partisan that way.
[PBS NewsHour / Atlantic / Image generated by DreamStudio AI]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if a one-time donation works better, do that! Help us keep you informed about what these bastards want, so we can all do what we can to stop them.
There's something about how Miller never even attempts to disguise that his motive is exclusively racist that is impressive. This bulbous manikin is just openly noxious, unashamedly one of the most bigoted people you will ever see. He doesn't even have a Fox presenter's shame enough to pretend otherwise. He's just poison set in a jelly mould of that yellow guy from Sin City.
All of this nonsense because millions of undereducated, incurious racists are terrified that the hell they rained on other people for centuries is about to blow back into their stupid faces.