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Tag: mass deportation

  • Texas National Guard departs Illinois

    The Texas National Guard has departed Illinois, ending a futile 41-day deployment in which its soldiers spent less than 24 hours working in support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation mission.

    The troops, who had been living at a U.S. Army Reserve training center in southwest suburban Elwood, left the facility around 1 p.m. Monday, according to a memorandum obtained by the Tribune. Additionally, any military personnel not permanently assigned to the Elwood facility would leave the site by Friday, the memo stated.

    In the memo, which was sent to local government officials on Monday, an official with Homeland Operations, 88th Readiness Division in Fort Sheridan, wrote that the “status of forces at the Joliet Local Training Area (JLTA), Elwood” had changed.

    As of 1 p.m., “all Soldiers that were utilizing the JLTA for living accommodations have departed the property. All established support requirements with your agencies beyond your normal scope of duties may cease at this time. There will still be a small element providing access control while contracted entities remove their equipment,” the memorandum stated. “Currently there is no definitive timetable for when the contractor will complete this action, however the Task Force Commander has directed that Friday will be the last day for any Military Personnel not permanently assigned to the Elwood Reserve center to be on site.”

    The departure marks yet another sign that Operation Midway Blitz — the name given to Trump’s immigration crackdown — is winding down.

    Last week, the Tribune reported Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, the top official on the ground leading the Trump administration’s efforts, was soon departing Chicago for another assignment, and most of the agents under this command were redeploying elsewhere. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security closed its command center at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, ending a more than two-month stay there.

    About 200 Texas National Guard members arrived in the Chicago area last month over the repeated objections of Illinois officials, who rejected Trump’s pledge to deploy the military domestically in response to heated protests here. The California National Guard also had troops temporarily assigned to the area.

    The Guard members, however, spent only one day protecting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Broadview before a federal judge blocked their deployment. The judge, however, allowed the out-of-state troops to remain at the Elwood training center, where they lived in mobile bunks and could be seen practicing drills during the day.

    A week after arriving, the Texas National Guard sent home seven soldiers whose fitness levels seemingly “did not meet mission requirements” for their deployment. The decision came after some soldiers were ridiculed on social media for their physical appearance upon their arrival in Illinois. Widely circulated media photographs showed heavier guardsmen at the Elwood base, prompting critics to question how the troops fit in with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s insistence that all military members must meet height and weight standards.

    The troops’ stay was otherwise uneventful, as underscored by the memorandum sent to local government agencies Monday.

    “I would like to thank all of you on behalf of the United States Army Reserve Homeland Operations Division for your support over the last 2 months in helping make the living area safe by providing emergency response functions and services, traffic mitigation, and decontamination coordination,” wrote Joseph Arne, an emergency management specialist with Homeland Operations. “There wasn’t ever a moment where the Task Force was concerned for Soldier safety knowing your organizations were on stand-by.”

    It’s unclear how the troop departures will affect the ongoing legal battle between Illinois and the Trump administration, as the issue is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Alicia Fabbre, Jeremy Gorner

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  • Trump Regards Millions of Americans As Enemies of the People

    Russ Vought’s coming for you!
    Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

    There are a lot of developments that can be cited to illuminate the crucial differences between the first and second Trump administrations, ranging from the simple idea that “practice makes perfect” to the observation that the president has carefully ensured no one around him will exercise a restraining influence over his darker impulses. But the government shutdown has brought to light one very specific change that is especially ominous, as Toluse Olorunnipa and Jonathan Lemire explain at The Atlantic:

    Thirty-four days into the previous government shutdown, in 2019, reporters asked President Donald Trump if he had a message for the thousands of federal employees who were about to miss another paycheck. “I love them. I respect them. I really appreciate the great job they’re doing,” he said at the time. The following day, caving after weeks of punishing cable-news coverage, he signed legislation to reopen the government, lauding furloughed employees as “incredible patriots,” pledging to quickly restore their back pay, and calling the moment “an opportunity for all parties to work together for the benefit of our whole beautiful, wonderful nation.”

    Doesn’t really sound like the same guy, does it?

    It sure doesn’t. Trump has greeted the 2025 shutdown as a heaven-sent opportunity to fire hundreds of thousands of employees at what he calls “Democrat Agencies” at the behest of his budget director, Russell Vought, the government-hating religious zealot whose nihilistic suggestions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 were considered so politically radioactive that Trump claimed to know nothing about the initiative. Now he’s posting AI video of Vought as the Grim Reaper come to life to get rid of bureaucrats who aren’t engaged in the holy MAGA trinity of killing, jailing, or deporting people.

    Yes, the president loves trolling people, and Vought swears by the value of “traumatizing” the denizens of the “deep state” who resist or simply get in the way of the administration’s agenda. But this is by no means an isolated incident of the vastly expanded list of Americans Trump now considers his current enemies and future victims. If you want to understand the most crucial difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, look to the targets of his wrath.

    Coming out of the 2024 election, there were many justifiable fears that Trump would act on his frequent threats of vengeance against highly placed “enemies” ranging from Republican “traitors” such as Liz Cheney, to the federal prosecutors who tried and failed to hold him accountable, to “fake news” media executives, to conspiracy-theory suspects like vaccine scientists. Likely targets included whole institutions thought to have betrayed him (like the FBI) and “radical left” policies like DEI and climate change that were campaign-trail hobgoblins.

    True to his malicious word, Trump has urged prosecutors and investigators and his social-media bullies to “go after” all these prominent symbols of the hated opposition. But now the ranks of “enemies of the people” has expanded far beyond the liberal elites and Never Trumpers who were objects of so much presidential ire in the past. Enemies now include whole categories of Americans deemed guilty by association with institutions and causes deemed inimical to the mission of “saving America.” Trump has signaled that entire cities will become “training grounds” for the U.S. military, denied self-governance and basic civil liberties because of their inherently perfidious nature as “the enemy within.” Major sectors of civil society, most obviously higher education, have been declared presumptively hostile and subject to shakedowns and forced takeovers. Anyone voicing opposition to the administration’s mass-deportation program is being treated as consciously treasonous and the ally of “invaders.” And most recently, in the wake of the assassination of MAGA and Christian-nationalist icon Charlie Kirk, the president, the vice-president, the top White House policy adviser, and the attorney general have all suggested that any strongly worded criticism of the administration might be treated as illegal incitement to violence or “terrorism.”

    Looking at all these phenomena, it should be clear that we are witnessing not just a rhetorical escalation of MAGA attacks on Trump enemies now that a supine Republican Party controls the federal government. The battleground is widening dramatically even as Trump wins more and more turf. Perhaps the president’s threats to lay waste to his own executive branch reflect a hitherto-unknown fidelity to old-school small-government conservatism of the sort that Vought and his friends in the House Freedom Caucus have fused with MAGA culture-war preoccupations into a radical ideology of maximum destruction. But more likely he understands that he has just three years left to consummate his lifelong war against those who opposed or underestimated him, and wants to leave as high a body count as possible. The “enemy within” could grow to encompass half the nation.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Judge says U.S. trying to do

    A federal judge on Saturday accused the Trump administration of trying to do an “end-run” around legal obligations that the U.S. has to protect people fleeing persecution and torture following the deportation of a group of African migrants to Ghana, some of whom are now slated to be returned to their home countries.

    U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the U.S. government to explain, by 9 p.m. EST on Saturday, what steps it was taking to prevent the deportees “from being removed to their countries of origin or other countries where they fear persecution or torture.”

    Earlier this month, the U.S. deported more than a dozen non-Ghanaian nationals to Ghana, including deportees from Gambia and Nigeria, making Ghana the latest country to accept these so-called third country deportations at the request of the Trump administration. Ghana’s government confirmed the deportations.

    Attorneys have alleged in a lawsuit that the deportees have been held in “squalid conditions and surrounded by armed military guards in an open-air detention facility” in Ghana. 

    Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Chutkan during a hearing Saturday that four of the deportees have been told that Ghana will return them to their native nations as early as Monday, despite the fact that they have orders from U.S. immigration judges that bar their deportation to their home countries due to concerns they could be persecuted or tortured there. One man from Gambia, who attorneys say is bisexual, has already been returned to Gambia, according to the lawsuit.

    The deportees’ legal protections — which are rooted in the United Nations Convention Against Torture and a provision of U.S. immigration law known as withholding of removal — prohibit the U.S. from sending foreigners to countries where they would face persecution or torture. But unlike asylum, they still allow the U.S. to send them to other, third-party countries.

    The Justice Department lawyer representing the U.S. government during the hearing did not dispute that Ghana plans to return the deportees to their native countries and conceded that the Ghanaian government appears to be violating diplomatic assurances that it allegedly made vowing not to send these migrants to places where they could be harmed. 

    But the Justice Department attorney said the U.S. could not tell Ghana what to do at this point.

    Chutkan appeared frustrated by that position, suggesting it was “disingenuous.” She grilled the Justice Department attorney about whether the U.S. knew this could happen and suggested the deportations seemed to be an “end-run” to bypass the legal protections the deportees have. She suggested the U.S. can retrieve the deportees and return them to the U.S. or transfer them to another country where they would be safe. Or, she added, it could tell Ghana it is violating its agreement with the U.S.

    “How’s this not a violation of your obligation?” she asked the Justice Department attorney.

    But Chutkan acknowledged her “hands may be tied” since the deportees are not on American soil nor in U.S. custody. She also implied that the Supreme Court would almost certainly pause any order that required the American government to act to stop the returns.

    Representatives for the Departments of State and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests to comment on the deportations to Ghana and Chutkan’s order.

    Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the African deportees, hailed Chutkan’s mandate.

    “The Court properly recognized that the United States government, with full knowledge that these individuals are going to be sent to danger, cannot simply wash their hands of the matter,” Gelernt told CBS News.

    As part of its mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration has sought to convince countries around the globe to receive deportees who are not their citizens, brokering agreements with nations including El Salvador, Kosovo, Panama and South Sudan.

    Camilo Montoya-Galvez

    Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration reporter at CBS News. Based in Washington, he covers immigration policy and politics.

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  • “Who’s going to take care of your child?”: Parents reel from Trump ICE crackdown

    Since the outset of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, Carolina Reyes, the director of the Arco Iris Bilingual Children’s Center in Maryland, had to start having conversations with parents about whom she should contact in case they disappear in an ICE raid.

    “I had to say, ‘You need to have a plan. I know it’s difficult, but you need to have a plan,’” Reyes told Salon. “I know it’s difficult, but you need to have a plan. And then they were like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ I was like, ‘I understand, but you have to because, unfortunately, you don’t know if you go to work and something happens, who’s going to take care of your child? What is going to happen? What do I have to do?”

    According to Reyes, this is only one of many difficult conversations she has had since the beginning of the Republican mass deportation campaign earlier this year.

    “We had a meeting with my teachers where we need to prepare if ICE comes. As a school, we are not allowing anybody to come into our school. We close the door and we lock down a little bit, if that’s the case. We are not going to release anybody, not to, particularly ICE or anything like that. We call parents too. We talk about it, and if we see ICE or any situation where we feel uncomfortable, parents will be notified,” Reyes said.

    From 2011 until the beginning of Trump’s second term, child care facilities had been off limits for ICE raids. Trump ended the protection afforded to child care facilities and other sensitive locations in January, telling immigration officers to “balance a variety of interests” when conducting operations in or around such locations.

    While it’s not clear whether ICE has conducted any raids on early childhood education centers yet, the rule change earlier this year and the administration’s readiness to detain children and families have left providers across the country in a state of anxiety with organizations advising that providers prepare for potential raids.

    The potential for direct raids on facilities isn’t the only issue impacting parents and children since the beginning of the GOP mass deportation campaign. For many of the families Reyes has worked with, parents are afraid to go to work because they’re worried that they, or one of their family members, might be targeted by ICE. At the same time, Reyes said, ICE had targeted those seeking food assistance at places like local churches, which left families of mixed immigration status with nowhere to turn.

    “Here in Maryland, ICE was going to those places too, to arrest people, so we started our own food program a little bit here, asking our own families to donate food so that families didn’t have to go to those places,” Reyes said.

    And the fear in the community goes beyond just noncitizen residents.

    “I did have some families who were concerned and worried, even though they had legal status in the United States, you know. But they’re immigrants, so we look like immigrants and Latinos, and some of them were concerned about that too,” Reyes said.

    Reyes’ experience is only a keyhole view into the dramatic effect that Trump and the GOP’s policies are having on the child care industry and the families that rely on it in the United States.

    The child care and early childhood education industry is among those most impacted by Trump’s immigration policies. According to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at Berkeley, around 500,000 workers in the industry are immigrants, accounting for about 21% of the industry’s workforce nationwide.

    The percentage of child care workers born outside the United States varies widely by state as well. In Florida, for example, 38% of early childhood educators were born outside the United States, while in a state like Vermont, the number is closer to just 3%.

    Beyond statistics, there are some communities in which immigrants maintain a critical role in terms of child care. The 19th detailed in a report this year the detention of Orozco Forero, a worker who cared for children with Autism and was the only provider who would take some children in her community.

    One child care provider located near Columbus, Ohio, who wished to be identified only as Ann, told Salon that since Trump’s mass deportation campaign began, they’ve been having a hard time finding new workers.

    “I have two who, in the middle of the hiring process, disappeared, or they no-showed. And then I found out from other trusted sources who know them that they are involved in immigration proceedings,” Ann said. “Even today, there’s one woman who was supposed to start with us — I don’t know the correct immigration or political term — she’s got clearance to be in the US. She’s originally from Mexico. Her father’s here, but they were able to get her immigration status made legit, if I can say it that way. But she’s disappeared for two weeks, and then I found out today that she’s had to travel to Cleveland for a court proceeding. I said to the other person who knows her, I just asked her, ‘is she okay?’”

    Ann said that the new problems haven’t been limited to hiring workers either. She told Salon that immigrant families have recently had problems getting financial benefits through Ohio’s Publicly Funded Child Care program for their children, who are American citizens.

    “Now what’s happening is I have immigrant families who have immigrant children, and U.S.-born children, we are having a hard time getting the families care and benefits for their entire family, including the U.S.-born child, and that’s when I start losing all hope in this,” Ann said.

    In the past, Ann said, she would be able to appeal the decision made by the county government to the state government with a high success rate. Now, however, she says families are increasingly being denied at the state level, too.

    According to Arabella Bloom, a researcher at the center, the mass deportation campaign, which impacts parents, children and the people who staff child care centers, is hitting a system that was struggling to begin with.

    “I think something important to note about childcare is that the system that we currently have right now — it’s kind of generous to call it a system,” Bloom said. “It’s very patchwork. Programs are happening in public schools, but programs are also happening in people’s homes. And so there’s not like a cohesive early childhood system. It’s a lot of programs kind of operating on their own. You know, many early childhood programs are for-profit, but they’re barely making ends meet.”

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    Bloom said that, even for those workers who are not immigrants, there is a “real fear about interacting with immigration,” especially among Hispanic workers and other people of color.

    The pressure from Trump’s mass deportation campaign comes in addition to more direct attacks on immigrants’ access to early childhood education from his administration and the Republicans in Congress.

    The Trump administration announced in July, for example, that it would be making undocumented immigrants, who are already largely ineligible for federal benefits, ineligible for Head Start and that administrators for Head Start would be checking for eligibility based on immigration status.

    “This decision undermines the fundamental commitment that the country has made to children and disregards decades of evidence that Head Start is essential to our collective future,” Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, told the Associated Press at the time.

    Bloom explained that some changes in the recent GOP budget also stood to have an outsized impact on the workers in the early childhood education industry, especially cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

    “We know that roughly 43% of early educators rely on public benefits to make ends meet because pay is so low, so it’s kind of just a like a perfect storm of at the same time that immigration efforts are ramping up, and that’s obviously going to be very impactful for the one in five early educators who are immigrants,” Bloom said.

    The GOP attacks on public benefits and immigration policy “threaten the supply of care that’s already hard to find,” Rachel Wilensky, a senior analyst on child care and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy, told Salon.

    Wilensky cited a CLASP study from 2018, which found that immigration actions like those being carried out by the Trump administration this year, and those that were conducted in the first administration, left a lasting impact on the physical, social and emotional development of young children.

    “Good nutrition, regular health care, a stable and healthy living environment, and nurturing care are necessities for children to grow and learn and ultimately do well in school, in their jobs, and throughout their lives,” Wilensky said. “When children don’t have their basic needs met—or when they experience hardship and distress—it undercuts their growth and development and can have enduring effects. Immigrants have been central throughout our nation’s history, and their experiences matter for our future. The success of the United States is tied to the health and well-being of immigrants, as well as their success in school and later careers.”

    The post “Who’s going to take care of your child?”: Parents reel from Trump ICE crackdown appeared first on Salon.com.

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  • Republicans Will Regret Calling for Mass Deportations

    Republicans Will Regret Calling for Mass Deportations

    Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

    You could make a pretty strong case that nativist-tinged anger over immigration has been the beating heart of the MAGA movement and its takeover of the Republican Party from the very beginning. The first real stirrings of a new right-wing rebellion against Establishment Republicanism began in sharp grassroots reaction to “amnesty” proposals from George W. Bush and John McCain to provide a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants. McCain was forced to all but repudiate his own long-standing position on the subject in order to nail down the GOP nomination in 2008. And then in 2012, the allegedly moderate Mitt Romney used a tough line on immigration to outflank conservative rivals like Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. By the time Trump began running for president with his birtherist attacks on Obama as an alleged alien, Romney’s encouragement of “self-deportation” was already looking a bit too mild for his party.

    Trump, of course, focused most of his immigrant-bashing fire as president on alleged border security lapses, even considering additional “amnesty” for young “Dreamers” in exchange for funding for his beloved border wall. Yes, his immigration advisor, the saturnine Stephen Miller, made noises about restricting legal immigration, not to mention Trump sponsoring the legally iffy Muslim Travel Ban, but MAGA on immigration was mostly about The Wall.

    That’s not true any more. Allegedly in response to a massive new influx of migrants (mostly from Central and South America) that at least temporarily overwhelmed the system for processing them, Trump has further radicalized his immigration pitch in his 2024 campaign. Aside from adopting the wild, baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats are eagerly encouraging migrants to to come to the country in order to vote illegally, Trump has gone from focusing on border security to promising to (as his Agenda 47 platform puts it) CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY — a pledge that is repeated word for word in the Republican Party platform for 2024. This new positioning reflects both the greatly increased salience of immigration as a weapon with which to bludgeon the Biden administration (and now Harris), as well as the radicalization of Trump’s own followers. An intense focus of MAGA folk on crimes allegedly committed by migrants has been an increasingly common feature of Trump campaign and party communications.

    Still, for those of us accustomed to thinking of the idea of rounding up and deporting immigrants as an essentially un-American proposition, it was startling to see the pre-printed “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention last month, the only issue-focused sign widely in evidence there. Do Republicans know what they are doing? Have they just gotten carried away with their rhetoric?

    It’s clear that for the moment at least, there’s a lot more public support for radical steps on immigration than we’ve seen in many decades. But for the most part, it appears deportation fever is limited to Republicans and conservatives. An April Pew survey found that only 37 percent of Americans, but 63 percent of Trump supporters, favored “a national effort to deport” undocumented immigrants. A June CBS/YouGov survey showed significantly higher support for a deportation program, with even a majority of Latino registered voters approving of the the idea. But it’s significant that once pollsters mention the mechanics of expelling many millions of people, support goes down significantly — as a June-July poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs indicated:

    When asked if the United States should detain millions of undocumented immigrants in mass detention camps while they await immigration hearings, a majority of Americans (65%), along with eight in 10 Democrats (80%) and two-thirds of Independents (68%) oppose doing so. By contrast, a majority of Republicans (57%) favor detaining millions of undocumented immigrants in camps (41% oppose).

    But that’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of controversy. Identifying undocumented immigrants before separating them from their families and herding them into camps would mean massive deployment of law enforcement to conduct sweeps of “suspected” neighborhoods and interdiction of “suspected” illegals on a scale never before imagined. Remember the furor that accompanied Arizona’s 2010 “show your papers” law that essentially legalized racial and ethnic profiling by traffic cops and police personnel until it was partially struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court? That would be replicated on a vast, national basis by any effective mass deportation regime, as I am sure Democrats and immigration advocates will be regularly reminding Latino voters between now and Election Day.

    But let’s say Trump wins anyway and with Miller as “immigration czar” the new administration gets serious about implementing a mass deportation regime. As the NBC News explains, the infrastructure for making this happen is not at all in place, and would cost an astronomical amount of federal money:

    The ICE budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420 million, and in that year the agency deported 142,580 people. Costs of deportation vary widely depending on the country and include variables such as commercial flight costs, security needs and the use of charter flights. Removal of 10 million people could easily cost in the tens of billions. But the millions of deportees would also have to be detained and housed prior to removal. Currently ICE manages 41,500 beds across 200 jail and detention centers at a cost of $57,378 per year per bed, according to public budget documents. In the event of a mass deportation, the government would need to pay for far more beds.

    That’s not to mention the cost of a spectacular increase in the already over-burdened system of immigration courts, the military and law enforcement costs, and the incredible economic disruptions associated with expulsion of a sizable portion of the U.S. work-force, and with the subsequent impact on mortgages and other loans. Former Undersecretary of Commerce Rob Shapiro estimates that mass deportation “could depress national wage and salary income by $317.2 billion or 2.7 percent of labor income in 2023” —more than your average recession — while also reigniting inflation in industries that depend on immigrant labor.

    Sooner — perhaps before the 2024 elections — or later, if mass deportation is actually attempted, Republicans will regret their current immigration bender. Perhaps the current reductions in border crossings or the emergence of other issues will turn down the red-hot pressure to push millions of people out of the United States. But if not, we could soon be experiencing scenes of violence and misery similar to what many of the country’s migrants came here seeking to flee.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

    Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’


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    Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.

    In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.

    Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Biden’s time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.

    Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last month on social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

    “What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”

    How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

    Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

    From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge “deportation force” or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trump’s four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nation’s interior as Barack Obama’s administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

    Read: The GOP’s true priority

    Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.

    This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.

    Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. “If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume that’s what they will try to do in a second term,” said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job. (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)

    Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Miller’s most extreme immigration ideas during Trump’s term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trump’s four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. “Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy,” Taylor said.

    Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

    To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.

    In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

    Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”

    The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

    Read: The specter of family separation

    Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.

    Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. “It’s not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented,” said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.

    All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale he’s discussing.

    Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to “break down doors” in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.

    “You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings,” Houser said. “Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.” He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.

    Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine, told me, “There’s no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time.” The example Trump most often cites as a model is “Operation Wetback,” the mass-deportation program—named for a slur against Mexican Americans—launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communities in cities such as Los Angeles. Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.

    The Republican response to Texas’s standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues. The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that he’ll build more of the barriers nonetheless. “We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence,” Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border, where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.

    But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.

    The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.

    The governors provided those forces to Trump under what’s known as “hybrid status” for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their state’s governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isn’t particularly unusual; what made that deployment “unprecedented,” in Joseph Nunn’s phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

    The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that don’t want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because it’s not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois’ constitutional rights. “Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal,” Nunn said. “One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving state’s consent.”

    But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.

    “There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,” Nunn told me. “There are quite literally no safeguards.”

    Read: America’s immigration reckoning has arrived

    The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.

    In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

    These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

    For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

    “What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”



    Ronald Brownstein

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  • How Biden Might Recover

    How Biden Might Recover

    A press release that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign issued last week offered a revealing window into his advisers’ thinking about how he might overcome widespread discontent with his performance to win a second term next year.

    While the release focused mostly on portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to legal abortion, the most telling passage came when the Biden campaign urged the political press corps “to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.”

    That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term, especially if the president faces a rematch with Trump. With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.

    It’s common for presidents facing public disappointment in their performance to attempt to shift the public’s attention toward their rival. All embattled modern first-term presidents have insisted that voters will treat their reelection campaign as a choice, not a referendum. Biden is no exception. He routinely implores voters to compare him not “to the Almighty” but “to the alternative.”

    But it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less. The other recent presidents with approval ratings around Election Day as low as Biden’s are now were Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Both lost their bids for a second term. Continued cooling of inflation might allow Biden to improve his approval rating, which stands around 40 percent in most surveys (Gallup’s latest put it at only 37 percent). But if Biden can’t make big gains, he will secure a second term only if he wins more voters who are unhappy with his performance than any president in modern times.

    The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.

    Read: Republicans can’t figure it out

    If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.

    “I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

    Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice. Buffeted by disappointment in their tenure, both Carter and Bush decisively lost their reelection bids despite their enormous efforts to convince voters that their opponent could not be trusted with power.

    In this century, it’s become somewhat easier for presidents to overcome doubts about their performance by inflaming fears about their rival. Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004 had more success than Carter and the elder Bush at both mobilizing their core supporters and attracting swing voters by raising doubts about their opponent.

    Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.

    Read: Will Republicans pay a price for extremism?

    While more voters than in the past appear willing to treat presidential reelections as a choice rather than a referendum, Biden may need to push this dynamic to a new extreme. Obama and Bush both had approval ratings right around 50 percent in polling just before they won reelection; that meant they needed to convince only a slice of voters ambivalent about them that they would be even more unhappy with their opponent.

    Biden’s approval rating is much lower, and he is even further behind the majority approval enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 before they won decisive reelections.

    Those comparisons make clear that one crucial question confronting Biden is how much he can improve his own standing over the next year. The president has economic achievements he can tout to try to rebuild his support, particularly an investment boom in clean energy, semiconductors, and electric vehicles tied to the trio of major bills he passed. Unemployment is at historic lows, and in recent months wages have begun rising faster than prices. The latest economic reports show that inflation, which most analysts consider the primary reason for the public discontent with his tenure, is continuing to moderate.

    All of these factors may lift Biden, but probably only modestly. Even if prices for gas, groceries, and rent stop rising, that doesn’t mean they will fall back to the levels they were at when Biden took office. Voters appear unhappy not only about inflation, but about the Federal Reserve Board’s cure of higher interest rates, which has made it harder to purchase homes and cars and to finance credit-card debt. Biden also faces the challenge that some portion of his high disapproval rating is grounded not in dissatisfaction over current conditions, but in a belief that he’s too old to handle the job for another term. Better economic news won’t dispel that doubt.

    For all of these reasons, while Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.

    Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”

    For Biden, the key group could be voters who say they disapprove of his performance in office, but only “somewhat,” rather than “strongly.” The Democrats’ unusually good showing among those “somewhat” disapproving voters was a central reason the party performed unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterm election. But in an NBC national survey released earlier this week, Trump narrowly led Biden among those disenchanted voters, a result more in line with historic patterns.

    Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

    Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)

    But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.

    In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

    Poll results such as those scare Democratic strategists perhaps more than any other; they indicate that some voters may be growing more willing to accept what they didn’t like about Trump (chaos, vitriol, threats to democracy) because they think he’s an antidote for what they don’t like about Biden (his results on inflation, immigration, and crime.) Jim McLaughlin, a Trump-campaign pollster, told me earlier this year that because of their discouragement with Biden’s record, even some voters who say “I may not love the guy” are growing newly receptive to Trump. “The example I had people use is that he is like your annoying brother-in-law that you can’t stand but you know at the end of the day he’s a good husband, he’s a good father,” McLaughlin said.

    The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.

    Trump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.

    Ronald Brownstein

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