WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be the next president. I’m still absorbing what this will mean.
Take very seriously his vow to use the U.S. military to help carry out mass deportations. We don’t know details about how Trump wants to use troops. Operate detention facilities? Transport people? Conduct raids? It’s all unknown.
On Monday, Trump wrote “TRUE” over a post on Truth Social that said, “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
I expect that on Day 1 — maybe within hours of being inaugurated on Jan. 20 — Trump will sign a proclamation invoking, say, the Insurrection Act or the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, or some other archaic law, to give him power to deploy the armed forces in the U.S.
It won’t mean that the Sharpie-wielding Trump will see troops marching through Chicago the next day.
It will mean that from Trump’s Day 1, or soon after, people will be “scrambling to try to figure out what his plans are. And it is meant to strike terror in the hearts of people, undocumented people in this country,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security program at New York University.
I interviewed Goitein about Trump’s intent to use the active duty military — maybe even the National Guard — because she is an expert in the use of presidential emergency powers.
Trump using the military impacts more than the undocumented, Goitein said.
It’s a way for Trump to inspire fear.
“He wants to do shock and awe, and this would be shock and awe, and not just for the undocumented, but for people in this country who are rightly alarmed at the prospect of using federal armed forces … to perform civilian law enforcement functions on U.S. soil.”
Trump’s impending crackdown has enormous implications for Chicago, home to thousands of new arrivals sent to the city by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. They are protected, for now, by temporary legal status granted by President Joe Biden.
Those temporary shields, granted on humanitarian or related grounds to asylum-seekers, are in danger of being revoked under Trump.
After Trump was elected, Gov. JB Pritzker vowed, “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Bravado, meet bravado.
Soon after, Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, was asked about Pritzker’s comment on a Charlie Kirk podcast. Kirk, who is close to Trump, is a Wheeling High School grad and founder of the influential Turning Point USA.
Said Homan, in reaction to Pritzker, “Game on. We’ve got no problem going through him.”
Here are other highlights of my conversation with Goitein:
On Trump federalizing the National Guard
“What Trump (is) seemingly planning is to declare that migration from (the) South” is “an invasion, and it’s being perpetrated by drug cartels that are acting as de facto governments. That is clearly an abuse of a wartime authority, but that seemingly, is what he’s planning.”
While Pritzker won’t be able to stop Trump from taking action to make the Illinois National Guard part of the federal armed forces, he will have options to fight it in court.
If the governor believes that the “federalization of the guard is being done for unlawful purposes, the governor can certainly, will, almost will definitely, have standing to bring a lawsuit challenging that deployment.”
How Trump could use military without invoking the Insurrection Act
“What he could do without invoking the Insurrection Act is to make military personnel and assets available to support federal law enforcement, civilian authorities in deportations.”
Goitein said there is a matter of whether troops are “actually merely supporting civilian authorities” or whether they cross the line to be “actually performing core law enforcement functions themselves, and that’s an area where there is a potential for challenge if Trump oversteps.”
It’s going to be hard, or perhaps even impossible, to prevent Trump from attempting a military play in advance. It will be up to the courts to see if he can actually do it.
Tara Sonenshine, the former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department under President Barack Obama, told me that “a haphazard and chaotic rounding up and deporting of immigrants will set up an unproductive showdown between local, national and international leaders within the U.S. and around the world.”
“The Trump administration will chip away at every avenue by which people who flee from disasters and desperate conditions in other countries find a legal path to America,” she said.