MONITORING (SW) – Donald Trump says that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
On Monday, on an early morning social media post, Trump responded “TRUE!!!” to a post by Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who wrote on 8 November that the next administration “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program”, reported Guardian.
Since his decisive victory, Trump has said he intends to make good on his campaign promise to execute mass deportations, beginning on the first day of his presidency. But many aspects of what he has described as the “largest deportation program in American history” remain unclear.
Trump has previously suggested he would rely on wartime powers, military troops and sympathetic state and local leaders. Such a sprawling campaign – and the use of military personnel to carry it out – is almost certain to draw legal challenges and pushback from Democratic leaders, some of whom have already said they would refuse to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda.
Through personnel announcements, the president-elect has put together a team of loyalists and hardliners to implement a second-term immigration crackdown.
According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960 billion over a decade.
Trump at various points claimed he would deport at least 15 million – and even as many as 20 million – people who are in the US illegally, but the figure is unverified.
There were an estimated 11 million people living in the United States without authorization as of 2022, according to an analysis by Pew Research. Migration to the US border reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 before dropping dramatically in 2024, following stepped-up enforcement by Mexico and an asylum clampdown by the Biden administration.
It is unclear who the Trump administration would target for deportation. His campaign trail rhetoric often failed to distinguish between immigrants who have lawful status and those in the country illegally. And throughout the campaign, Trump claimed that immigrants crossing the US southern border in recent years were driving up crime, even though violent crime is down across the country and studies show immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.
