The elected president of the United States, Donald Trumpconfirmed this Monday that he will use the Armed Forces and invoke a figure known as national emergencywhich grants the president extraordinary powers, in order to implement their plans for mass deportation of undocumented migrants.
Trump confirmed his plans this Monday on his social network Truth Social, in which he reacted with a “TRUE!” to a publication by conservative activist Tom Fitton, who this month had assured that the new Administration was prepared to “declare a national emergency and use military assets” to carry out the deportations.
Trump’s campaign has not publicly offered specific details about how these deportations will be carried outalthough that was one of his main promises during the electoral campaign.
To implement this plan, Trump plans to resort to National Emergencies Act of 1976, which grants the president extraordinary powers and allows him to bypass Congress to implement measures against what must be perceived as a threat to the security of the United States.
Trump already used this resource during his first term in 2019, when he declared a national emergency to redirect billions of dollars allocated to the Pentagon towards the construction of the border wall with Mexico, a measure that faced multiple lawsuits.
Throughout his campaign, Trump also promised to mobilize National Guard reservists to support deportations and even suggested relocating troops stationed abroad to the southern border of the United States to enforce the country’s immigration laws.
These measures would represent a significant change in the role that the Armed Forces have played until now, since US legislation strictly prohibits the use of the Army for national surveillance tasks, as detailed on its website by the Brennan Center for Justice.
In the United States it is estimated that they reside 11 million undocumented and that these mass deportation plans could affect 20 million familiesmany of them with members who are US citizens, according to the migrant advocacy organization America’s Voice.
Those deportations could cost billions of dollars a year and cause labor shortages in key sectors of the economy that depend on undocumented migrants, such as agriculture or the service sector, according to the nonpartisan group American Immigration Council.
Donald Trump’s team has laid out a multifaceted plan aimed at significantly expanding deportations during his second term. One of the central elements of the strategy includes the construction of “large detention facilities that will function as transfer centers,” explained Stephen Miller, Trump’s main immigration policy advisor. These facilities, managed by the Department of Homeland Security, would serve as spaces where migrants would remain while their cases are resolved and their flights to other countries are organized.
A key challenge to this mass deportation operation is the current limited capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold significantly larger numbers of detainees. Trump’s team maintains that the new camps could speed up the deportation process, estimating that more people would choose to accept removal rather than initiate lengthy legal proceedings if they must remain detained during the process.
The plan also includes an increase in ICE personnel by temporarily reassigning agents from other security agencies and activating state National Guard troops and federal troops under the Insurrection Act to enforce regulations on national soil. It also contemplates the expansion of rapid expulsions, a process that currently applies to recent immigrants near the border, to cover those who reside in the interior of the country and cannot prove that they have lived more than two years in the United States.
Another notable measure is the proposal to eliminate the granting of documents that certify citizenship, such as passports and Social Security cards, to infants born in the United States to undocumented migrant parents, in order to end citizenship by birth.
(With information from EFE and AP)
