Trump says he is ready to use the military, national emergency to deport more people | Donald Trump News

The US president-elect says he may use controversial means to fulfill a campaign promise, but questions about the mandate remain.

United States President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that he is “ready” to declare a national emergency and use military assets to fulfill his 2024 campaign promise to deport more people.

Trump made the announcement Monday in a brief post on his Truth Social forum in response to a post by Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Fitton had written on November 8 that reports indicated the Trump administration was “is ready to declare a national emergency and will use military equipment for its “mass expulsion”.

Trump replied: “True!!!”

The statement is still a strong message of how Trump plans to fulfill his campaign promise to carry out the “biggest deportation operation” in American history.

This effort has prompted criticism from rights advocates and raised concerns questions about the feasibility and limits of Trump’s power as president to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the country.

A Republican president-elect too it’s all but guaranteed facing a number of legal challenges though he continues.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, chief executive of the American Immigration Council, said Monday that under US law, presidents can declare a national emergency and use emergency powers only in certain circumstances.

“And ‘using the military in deportations’ is not one of these specific things,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media in response to Trump’s comments.

Unanswered questions

Although Trump has been vowing to deport him for months as he became embroiled in an immigration scandal during his successful re-election campaign, he has offered few details on how he intends to carry out his plans once he takes office in January.

There are an estimated 11 to 13 million undocumented citizens living in the US, and immigration and human rights groups have long warned of the humanitarian fallout from mass deportation efforts.

They said such a policy would require a large and expensive increase in enforcement and detention capabilities.

An analysis by the American Immigration Council found that increasing deportations by a million people a year – about four times the current rate – would cost $967.9bn over ten years.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and a long-time adviser on tough immigration policies, has floated the idea of ​​”outing” the US National Guard, a branch of the military, to attack and detain.

Tom Homan, the former head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who has been appointed to be Trump’s “border chief”, recently told the CBS TV program 60 Minutes that the administration will use “enforcement”.

Homan said in an interview at the end of October that the emphasis would be on workplaces and “threats to public safety and threats to national security”.

To avoid family separation, Holman added: “Families can be evicted together.”

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to invoke the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 — a law that allows presidents to deport citizens of an “enemy nation” without due process — when talking about his deportation plans.

But legal experts say he does not have the authority to use the law to deport more people.

On Monday, Reichlin-Melnick noted that Trump declared a national emergency in 2019 during his first term as president to open military funding for the border wall.

He said it is possible that the president-elect is planning to use a similar strategy to open up funds for the military to strengthen the deportation law, but he warned that Trump’s words should be taken with a grain of salt.

“My lesson from the first is that we can never take the things people in Trumpworld say as gospel, given their lack of specifics and total willingness to make big announcements aimed at rousing the libs. [liberals] and making headlines.”