In his first term, Trump's plans to send troops to "war" on the southern border were thwarted. This time he talked about sending up to 300,000 people there.
Donald Trump's plans to give himself sweeping powers "on day one" of the new administration include sending huge numbers of US troops - potentially "hundreds of thousands" - to close the southern border and help build a new network of immigration detention camps , three people familiar with the situation told Rolling Stone.
Trump and some of his supporters have repeatedly said that every second administration should treat the crossing of migrants as a "war" on American soil. During Trump's first term, officials and lawyers thwarted similar plans for military police on the border because of legal concerns, according to former senior officials such as Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Now the former president is determined to surround himself with aides and MAGA-friendly lawyers who can make such draconian policies "completely legal" in a possible second term, two sources close to Trump said. While a second Trump administration is far from certain, groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union are still bracing for a possible blitz of warrant checks involving the military if he wins, lawyers and activists say.
According to three people familiar with the matter, Trump and some of his closest allies have talked for the past year that if Trump wins re-election next year, they will immediately send a "surge" of federal troops to the US-Mexico border to seal it. At times, Trump has expressed a willingness to send what one source described as "many thousands" of US troops to close the southern border and enforce his draconian vision. Another source familiar with the matter recalled that Trump had said the operation could require between tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of troops.
"I've heard between 100,000 and 300,000 people from President Trump, Stephen Miller and others about what it might take to get the job done right," said one insider. "There are differences of opinion on how much it will actually take and everyone has their own ideas.... Nothing is set in stone."
Since the 1980s, presidents of both parties have sent active-duty troops and the National Guard to the U.S. border, often with congressional support. Often, these missions involved troops performing support or administrative functions so that Customs and Border Protection officers could focus on law enforcement. During his first administration, Trump sent more than 5,000 National Guard troops to the border, where they helped with maintenance activities such as stringing wire along the border with Mexico.
At the time, Trump repeatedly muttered how the act was a half-measure and complained that "disloyal" administration officials were preventing him from sending more forces to the southern border, according to a former senior administration official.
Those provocations set off a clash between Trump's top immigration adviser, Miller, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Miller began drafting a plan for another deployment that would have required sending 250,000 troops to seal off the border with Mexico, according to the New York Times. An angry Esper reportedly stepped in and scuttled the idea.
Trump's tentative second-term strategy — using active-duty military in a direct enforcement role at the border — may be a continuation of Miller's plans. But it represents a break with the way presidents have used the military. Trump and his aides envision using the deployed troops to perform roles currently prohibited by federal law — including arresting, detaining and transporting migrants at the southern border. According to critics and sources close to Trump, making that possible would require a historic power grab.
Trump has considered invoking the Sedition Act to secure the necessary powers to turn the military into his own border police. The law was passed in the 19th century and was intended to allow presidents to provide a militia to the then-small civilian authorities in case they found themselves overwhelmed. Since then, presidents have used this authority on rare occasions, including when President Dwight Eisenhower used the 101st Airborne Division in Little Rock, Arkansas, following the Supreme Court's order to desegregate schools.
Besides a possible troop surge, Trump and his political advisers have also considered using the first day of his second administration to introduce an expanded version of the infamous travel ban (dubbed by critics the "Muslim ban"); order the government to begin using Title 42 pandemic restrictions that allow the government to deny migrants for public health reasons; and to begin what he publicly claimed would be "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history," the sources said.
These initiatives would call for the construction of "expansion camps" to "collect" vast numbers of undocumented immigrants, and such "plans would sharply curtail both legal and illegal immigration in multiple ways."
If Trump is re-elected, immigration law will have "fewer safeguards" and administration officials are likely to "become even more creative," says American Immigration Council policy director Aaron Reichlin-Melnyk. He says he and his colleagues are already preparing for the worst. "The biggest fear for a future Trump administration is not only that it will weaponize existing immigration laws, but that it will act in a way — whether with the military or with public health laws — that will replace immigration law."
Despite the discussions taking place in Trump's inner circle, it remains unclear how far a re-elected Trump will ultimately go. Border policy discussions taking place at the highest echelons remain volatile, and other sources close to Trump have stressed that any plans to deploy war zone-style troops could easily be scaled back.
In public, the former president has hinted at his desire to make at least some of them a reality. "Upon my inauguration, I will immediately end every open border policy of the Biden administration," Trump told fans at a rally in Iowa in September. "I will make it clear that we must use whatever resources are necessary to stop the invasion, including moving thousands of troops who are currently stationed overseas."
This rhetoric matches what Trump has been saying in private. In one of the conversations earlier this year, his advisers told him that creating the kind of military force along the border he wants could require pulling American troops "from Germany" or other countries, then redeploying them to the border between USA and Mexico.
Miles Taylor, a former Trump Department of Homeland Security official, says he's seen similar ideas from the then-president thwarted by lawyers. At times, Taylor says, he learned that Trump had told his White House chief of staff John Kelly and Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen that he wanted to send "hundreds of thousands of troops to the southern border to deal with law enforcement and to stop the "invasion".
"Every time he raised the issue, he was repeatedly told that it was illegal and a violation of the War Actions Act, to which he demanded that the administration's lawyers 'find a way' to make it legal," Taylor recalled. Faced with inaction by administration lawyers, Trump often forgot about the issue and moved on.
"If he's reelected, I think it would be foolish to think that he's just going to let it happen again," Taylor says. /BGNESc
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