Donald Trump confirms plan to declare national emergency, use military for mass deportations

Donald Trump has confirmed he intends to declare a national emergency and use the military in some capacity to carry out his promised mass deportation of immigrants who do not have legal residency status.

Taking to Truth Social, the President-elect responded to a post from Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, suggesting the Trump administration would “declare a national emergency and use military assets” to address illegal immigration through a mass deportation program.

Mr Trump responded at 4 am on Monday, local time, with a single word: “TRUE!!!”

Throughout is presidential campaign, Mr Trump has vowed to mobilise the National Guard to assist with his promised mass deportation effort — he has also gone further to suggest calling thousands of foreign troops to the US-Mexico border.

He pledged to start his promised mass deportation campaign as soon as he enters office. His inauguration is set to be held on January 20, 2025.

“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” Mr Trump said at a rally at Madison Square Garden in the final days of his presidential campaign.

“I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

Mr Trump has already named several immigration hard-liners to serve in his Cabinet, including Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and former acting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan as “border czar”.

Mr Homan has discussed his own vision for mass deportations, echoing Mr Trump’s sentiments, saying it would initially concentrate on removing criminals and national security threats, but he did not rule out deporting families together.

Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Mr Homan said he wanted to “take the handcuffs of ICE”, but that he needed more resources to ramp up arrests. He said he was heading to Mar-a-Lago this week “to put the final touches on the plan”.

There are an estimated 11 million unauthorised immigrants living in the US, removing them could cost billions of dollars per year, according to American Immigration Council estimates.

Experts have told ABC News that if Mr Trump were to call the National Guard to assist in his deportation efforts, it would be a “fundamental shift” in duty for the military, which does not normally engage with domestic law enforcement issues.

As for declaring a national emergency, Congress has granted sitting presidents power to do so at their discretion to unlock standby powers that include redirecting funds to particular concerns.

During his first term, Mr Trump used this power to reallocate funds to spend more money on his promised border wall than Congress had been willing to permit — which led to a government shutdown in 2019.

That call led to legal challenges that had not been definitively resolved before President Joe Biden took over and halted further construction on the border wall.

Mr Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, previously told the New York Times that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centres” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries. Mr Miller said the Homeland Security Department would run the facilities.

A major criticism of ICE’s immigration and deportation efforts is that its facilities are inadequate for holding a significantly larger number of immigrants, which has led to a much-derided “catch and release” practice — whereby officials sometimes let asylum-seekers into the country as they await court dates with immigration judges.

The Trump team reportedly believes that building these facilities would enable the government to accelerate deportations of immigrants who fight their removal. The idea is that more people would accept removal instead of pursuing a drawn-out legal battle if they have to stay locked up in the interim.

Trump’s team says it had developed a multifaceted plan to increase the number of deportations, perhaps without needing new legislation from Congress.

The plan also involved bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials reassigned from other agencies, and from troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

The team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to migrant parents who are not legal residents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

— with The New York Times.