The US president-elect says he could resort to controversial measures to fulfill his campaign promises, but questions about his authority remain.
United States President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that he is “ready” to declare a state of national emergency and use military means to achieve his goals. 2024 electoral campaign promise to carry out mass deportations.
Trump made the announcement Monday in a short post on his Truth Social platform in response to a message from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch.
Fitton wrote on November 8 that reports showed the new Trump administration was “prepared to declare a national emergency and would use military means” in its “mass deportation” campaign.
Trump responded: “It’s true!!! »
The statement is the strongest message yet about how Trump plans to fulfill his campaign promise to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history.
The effort drew condemnation from rights advocates and raised questions about the feasibility and limits of Trump’s power as president to expel millions of undocumented immigrants from the country.
The Republican president-elect is also almost assured face a mountain of legal challenges no matter how it proceeds.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Monday that under U.S. law, presidents can only declare a national emergency and exercise emergency powers in specific situations.
“And ‘using the military for deportations’ is not one of those specific things,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media in response to Trump’s remarks.
Unanswered questions
While Trump has been promising deportation for months as he focused on the immigration issue during his successful re-election campaign, he has given few details on how he plans to implement his plans once. once he takes office in January.
An estimated 11 to 13 million undocumented residents live in the United States, and immigration and human rights groups have long warned of the humanitarian fallout from a mass deportation effort.
They said such a policy would likely require a huge and costly increase in law enforcement and detention capacity.
An analysis by the American Immigration Council found that increasing deportations to one million people a year — or about four times the current rate — would cost $967.9 billion over a decade.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s new deputy chief of staff for policy and longtime adviser on radical immigration policieshas already floated the idea of ”charging” the US National Guard, a branch of the military, to carry out large-scale raids and detentions.
Tom Homan, the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who has since been named Trump’s new “border czar,” recently told the CBS television show 60 Minutes that the administration would use “targeted enforcement.”
Homan said in the late October interview that the focus would be on construction sites and “threats to public safety and national security.”
To avoid family separations, Holman added: “Families can be deported together. »
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump regularly promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – a law that allows presidents to expel citizens of an “enemy nation” without the usual procedures – when he spoke of his plans for deportation.
But legal experts said it does not have the power to use the law for mass expulsions.
On Monday, Reichlin-Melnick noted that Trump declared a national emergency in 2019 during his first term as president to unlock military funding for a border wall.
He said the president-elect may be considering using a similar maneuver to unlock military funds for deportation enforcement, but cautioned that Trump’s remarks should be taken with a grain of salt.
“My lesson from the first time is that we absolutely cannot take the words of the Trumpworld people as gospel, given their complete lack of detail and complete willingness to make grandiose statements aimed at triggering liberals and make headlines. »