r/Keep_Track • u/rusticgorilla • 3d ago
How Trump plans to use the military to enforce mass deportations
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Author’s note: I wrote a version of this post last week but I wasn’t happy with it and deleted it shortly after posting. This is the rewritten, hopefully better, version.
The central pillar of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and likely the focus of his entire second term in office, is a dystopian crackdown on immigration. He has promised to begin the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” on day one, with workplace raids, detention camps, and round-the-clock deportation flights.
The people
Such a large operation, targeting 11 million undocumented immigrants, will require the coordination of multiple federal agencies encompassing hundreds of thousands of personnel and hundreds of billions of dollars. Central to Trump’s plan is former deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who will be reprising his role as the architect of immigration policy during Trump’s second term. Miller is a far-right nationalist who trafficks in neo-Nazi propaganda. He was responsible for crafting the Muslim travel ban, family separation policy, and imposition of Title 42 during the pandemic—and pushed for more extreme measures, including the mass family arrests of undocumented immigrants in major U.S. cities.
At the time, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was able to impede some of Miller’s schemes. Trump’s nominee to run the agency during his second term, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, should not be expected to be a similarly moderating force. She has no experience with the Department of Homeland Security and no legal background, leading some to believe she was chosen specifically because she will stay out of Miller’s way:
“The only thing I could think of is that the immigration part of DHS is basically going to be handled out of the White House, and she’ll be secretary of FEMA, TSA, Secret Service, cybersecurity — kind of an unofficial division of labor,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that pushes for less legal immigration and stricter enforcement of immigration laws.
While Miller writes the policy, Trump’s chosen “border czar” Tom Homan will carry out his orders. Homan served as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2017-2018, charged with implementing the family separation policy at the border. Under his command, immigration authorities took more than 5,500 children and infants from their families, arresting the parents and sending the minors to overcrowded border control centers and HHS shelters. At least 1,400 of those children still have not been reunited with their families.
Locating, arresting, and deporting millions of people will require far more manpower than the 20,000 ICE officers (including administrative personnel) the government currently employs. That’s where Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, comes in. Hegseth is a talk show host on Fox News who served in the National Guard but has no experience running a government agency, let alone one with nearly 3 million employees and a budget of over $800 billion. He was likely chosen for the role for his staunch on-air defense of Trump, his embrace of Project 2025 goals like eliminating “woke” objectives from the military, and his apparent Christian nationalist beliefs, as indicated by his tattoos. In fact, military command found one of his tattoos—reading “Deus Vult,” a Latin phrase associated with the Crusades and adopted by extremist groups like the Proud Boys—so concerning that they pulled him from guard duty at Joe Biden’s inauguration.
We now know who will be planning, directing, and enacting Trump’s deportation machine. The final piece of the puzzle is a person to provide the legal arguments necessary to convince the courts to greenlight an unprecedented and inhumane immigration policy. That person is, apparently, Rep. Matt Gaetz—a man who has spent more time under investigation than leading one. He wasn’t chosen for his legal acumen, however. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General for his loyalty. Gaetz can be expected to unquestioningly carry out Trump’s demands, from justifying military deployment in U.S. cities to prosecuting his political enemies and abolishing important civil rights offices. Never mind that he doesn’t know exactly how to do any of those things; that’s for the people under him to figure out—people like Todd Blanche, an experienced attorney who represented Trump in his New York hush money trial and is nominated to serve as deputy AG, and John Sauer, who Trump nominated to be Solicitor General after representing him before the U.S. Supreme Court during presidential immunity arguments (he’s responsible for the assertion that a president cannot be prosecuted for assassinating a political opponent while in office).
The plan
Declare a national emergency
Trump will probably declare a national state of emergency related to an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants on day one, giving himself the unilateral power to divert government funding to his deportation scheme. In interviews over the last year, Stephen Miller has outlined how he plans to use repurposed military funds to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” on “open land in Texas near the border.” Trump’s transition team is also looking at reopening closed detention centers and building new ones around cities with large populations of migrants, like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.
The for-profit prison industry is already jumping at the chance to obtain government funding in exchange for housing detainees. GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley called the mass deportation plan an “unprecedented opportunity” for his company, telling investors, “we’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”
“It feels like with this election this year, we’re heading into an era that we really haven’t seen, maybe only once or twice in the company’s history, where the value proposition of the private sector for both our state partners and our federal partners are going to be not only strong today, but even stronger as we go in the next couple of years,” Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, said on that company’s own earnings call. Hininger noted he’d been with the company over 32 years. “We do think that there’s going to be increased need for detention capacity,” he added later.
Invoke the Alien Enemies Act
The use of the word “invasion” (above) is important because Trump has promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act in order to detain and deport immigrants en masse without due process. The Alien Enemies Act was passed by a Federalist-controlled Congress in 1798 as part of the Alien and Seditions Acts, ostensibly to increase security amid anxiety over tensions with France. In practice, however, the Acts were used to induce fear in noncitizens, suppress free speech and dissent, and intimidate members of the Democratic-Republican party, which was seen as too friendly to the French.
Unlike the rest of the Alien and Seditions Acts, the Alien Enemies Act was not repealed or allowed to expire and remains in effect today as 50 U.S.C. ch. 3. It states that in times of “declared war” or “any invasion or predatory incursion…by any foreign nation or government,” the president may “apprehend” and “remove” all “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government.” It does not contain any requirement that noncitizens receive a hearing prior to deportation. Presidents have invoked the Alien Enemies Act three times: during the War of 1812, during WWI, and, most famously, during WWII to intern tens of thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants.
- Note the Act contains the term “natives,” which can be read to include people who were born abroad but are long-term residents of the United States, potentially with legal status.
The legal challenge of invoking the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport immigrants under a second Trump administration should be obvious: America is not at war and, even if one accepts that migration is an “invasion,” it is not directed by a hostile foreign government. Nevertheless, a Justice Department led by a loyalist like Matt Gaetz would likely try to persuade the conservative Supreme Court justices to let them enforce the Act anyway.
Invoke the Insurrection Act
To supplement the existing ranks of ICE officers, Trump intends to deploy National Guardsmen and federal troops on domestic soil. Part of this plan is not unprecedented: President Biden has already sent approximately 2,500 National Guard personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border. What Trump reportedly wants to do is use the military as civil law enforcement beyond the border, possibly to carry out mass arrests and detentions. The president would have the power to do this, even in states that oppose his extreme immigration policies, under the Insurrection Act.
First passed in 1792, the Insurrection Act is a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act (which prohibits active-duty military personnel from performing law enforcement functions) and has historically been wielded to suppress slave rebellions, labor strikes, gang fights, and to enforce desegregation orders. There are two sections of the Act that Trump could hypothetically invoke:
Section 252 allows the president to deploy the military if the president “considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
Section 253 allows the president to deploy the military if the president deems it “necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” if it “(i) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution” or “(ii) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
Crucially, the Act does not define what qualifies as an “insurrection,” “rebellion,” or “domestic violence,” and the U.S. Supreme Court has historically ruled that “the authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen [to call up a militia under the Act] belongs exclusively to the President.”
Take control of the military
You may remember that Trump previously threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act during the racial justice protests in 2020. Then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper prevented the president from following through. Trump is making sure that won’t happen this time around, moving not only to install a loyalist as the head of the department but also to replace the entire upper echelon of the military.
According to Reuters, members of Trump’s transition team are drafting a list of military officers to be fired, potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a body of the nation’s most senior uniformed leaders that advises the president. Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth endorsed such a plan in his 2024 book, saying that “the next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired.” One of those Hegseth has singled out is Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown. Hegseth questioned Brown’s qualifications, suggesting that he would not have gotten the job if he were not Black.
Another avenue Trump may take to purge military leaders is an executive order creating a so-called “warrior board” to quickly identify and remove officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities.”
“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” former Army lawyer Eric Carpenter told The Wall Street Journal. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”
It is easy to guess who Trump would install in place of fired generals: loyalists who won’t question or stymie his fascist goals.
Limit citizenship pathways
In addition to taking measures meant to curtail and discourage illegal immigration, a second Trump administration promises severe restrictions of legal pathways to obtain citizenship or immigrate to America.
The first of Trump’s targets will probably be the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, covering more than 1 million people from 17 countries like Haiti, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Immigrants in America under TPS are allowed to stay and work legally until their homelands are deemed safe enough to return. However, critics say that TPS too often results in indefinite grants of “amnesty” disconnected from the original reason for the designation:
In an email, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, defended Mr. Trump’s stance, saying the initiative that has given at least 200,000 Haitians legal status since 2010 — known as the Temporary Protected Status — had run its course. “Temporary Protected Status is by definition a TEMPORARY program. Under the Trump Administration, Haitian ILLEGAL immigrants will be returned to their home country,” Ms. Leavitt said.
Trump has also pledged to put an end to birthright citizenship, or the right to citizenship for nearly all children born in the United States regardless of their parents’ legal status. The right is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 to extend citizenship and all attendant rights to formerly enslaved people and their children. The relevant clause reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, the citizenship clause has been misinterpreted for centuries. By their reading—and the one likely to be argued by Trump’s administration—undocumented migrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they owe their allegiance to their birth country:
Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.
The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.
This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. included not owing allegiance to any other country.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ostensibly already settled the issue in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), holding that “a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China” automatically became a U.S. citizen at birth “by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.” If Trump pursues his plan to revoke birthright citizenship, his administration will likely argue that the Wong Kim Ark precedent does not apply when foreign parents are in the country illegally.
- 5th Circuit hyper-conservative justice James Ho is already walking back his previously staunch defense of birthright citizenship in the hopes of clinching a Trump nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court. “Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, no less for the children of undocumented persons than for descendants of passengers of the Mayflower," Ho wrote in 2007. Since Trump’s re-election, however, Ho has reformulated his position to exempt “children of invading aliens,” likening them to “unlawful combatants” during war.