Immigration advocacy groups and Democratic leaders seek to disrupt President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to expel millions undocumented immigrants by pre-drafting lawsuits that could be filed as soon as he takes office.
Trump has pledged to carry out what he calls “the largest deportation operation” in the country’s history and pledged to reinstate and expand his controversial ban on entry into the United States from certain Muslim-majority countries as part of its immigration policy.
On Monday, he reaffirmed on Truth Social that he was ready to declare a state of national emergency and use military means to keep his promise of mass deportation.
Several immigration advocates and Democratic leaders told ABC News they have spent months preparing for the prospect of another Trump presidency and the expected crackdown on immigrants that Trump and his new party have implemented. profit. border czar Tom Homan promised.
Homan, who endorsed Trump’s pledge to undertake mass deportations on “day one” of the new administration, oversaw the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency during the application of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” which separated parents from their children at the border. .
“In California, we have been thinking about the possibility of this day for months and in some cases years, and we are preparing and preparing by reviewing every action that Trump has said he will take,” the attorney general said from California, Rob Bonta. ABC News.
Bonta said his team prepared briefing notes on several immigration issues mentioned by Trump on the campaign trail. including mass deportations, birthright citizenship, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and sanctuary cities.
President-elect Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office of the White House during a meeting with President Joe Biden, November 13, 2024, in Washington.
Evan Vucci/AP
“He will inflict pain and harm on her. Not everything is preventable, but to reach our immigrant communities in a way that violates the law, they will have to go through me and we will stop them in court using the legal tools provided to us,” Bonta said.
California’s attorney general says 80% of the state’s legal challenges to executive orders and immigration policies from Trump’s first term have been successful.
“We are confident that we will block the major efforts of the federal administration and that we will be able to mitigate the worst of them,” Bonta said.
The 24 Democratic attorneys general in the United States hope to present a united front to block the Trump administration’s immigration policies using his first term as a model, according to Sean Rankin, president of the Association of Democratic Attorneys General.
“When we look at immigration, we know it’s something the president has talked about time and time again,” Rankin told ABC News. “At this point, we’re not connecting the dots. We’re following the flashing arrows. It’s very easy to see where they’re going to go.”
One of Homan’s targets in his mass deportation plan is sanctuary states and cities — places that have enacted laws intended to protect undocumented immigrants. The policies, which vary by state, generally prohibit municipal officials from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
“They better get out of the way,” Homan said last week, of sanctuary state governors. “Either you help us or you get away from it, because ICE is going to do its job.”
Leaders of several sanctuary cities have said they will fight back using every legally available tool to protect immigrant communities.
“We have worked in this office to prepare for many different scenarios and we will be prepared to meet them with all the tools we have,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said at a news conference. last week.
Ferguson told reporters that between 2017 and 2021, his legal team defeated 55 “illegal actions” and policies by the Trump administration. But while his office has been preparing for the litigation for months, Ferguson said he believes the second Trump administration will also be better prepared than the first.
In this October 11, 2024 file photo, the border fence is seen from a drone camera between the United States and Mexico in San Luis, Arizona.
The Washington Post via Getty Images, FILE
“One of the many reasons we were successful in our lawsuit against the Trump administration is that they were often negligent in how they were deployed, which gave us the opportunity to prevail,” Ferguson told reporters. “In court this time, I think we’ll see less of that, and that’s an important difference.”
In addition to considering using the military to carry out deportations, Trump and his allies have suggested using an obscure section of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 — a set of 18th-century war laws — to immediately deport certain migrants without a hearing. .
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, told ABC News they are preparing for the potential use of the military to carry out deportations.
“They’re going to try to use the military, under the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily deport people,” Gelernt said. “We will try to challenge it immediately.”
Gelernt, who led the ACLU’s legal response to family separations during Trump’s first term, said he expects the next Trump administration to be “worse for immigrants” than the first.
“Team Trump has apparently been preparing for four years to implement anti-immigration policies, and the rhetoric in the country has become far more polarized than it was in 2016,” Gelernt said.
During Trump’s first term, Gelernt said groups like the ACLU were caught off guard with some of his executive orders, like the travel ban — but this time around, the organization has been preparing litigation for nearly of one year. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s controversial ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, which the Biden administration later removed. Since then, Trump has nominated two justices to the Supreme Court.
“We are preparing for our challenges with much more advanced preparation and we are doing our best to coordinate all the different NGOs (non-governmental organizations) across the country,” Gelernt said.
“As trial lawyers, we came together, we prepared, we tried to anticipate the unimaginable as we approach the next four years,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the New York Times. York University Faculty of Law.