Washington, DC — As HuffPost reported this morning, Donald Trump “has confirmed reports that he plans to declare a national emergency to enact a mass deportation program. The president-elect, who repeatedly vowed to deport undocumented immigrants during his campaign, said the reports are ‘true’ in a post on his Truth Social account early Monday. Trump issued his one-word confirmation while reposting a comment from Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who said Trump will ‘use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion.’”
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council noted in response, “Trumpworld has been blurring ‘the border’ and ‘mass deportations.’ Fitton’s claim links them (‘Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.’) In 2019 Trump declared a national emergency to unlock military funds for border wall. This could be similar.”
To be clear, as Reichlin-Melnick points out, there is no law that allows a president to declare an emergency and then use the military to do anything, let alone enforce immigration law domestically. However, it is notable that Trump’s justification back when he closed the government in 2019 and now is the white nationalist conspiracy theory that immigration constitutes a literal military-style invasion.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director for America’s Voice:
“Trump continues promoting anti-immigration hate and is using it as an excuse to appropriate the military for domestic law enforcement and circumvent normal checks and balances on presidential power.
Trump and allies are attempting to justify their potential use of the military to conduct indiscriminate mass raids and roundups by wrapping it in the language of ‘invasion’ and the false notion that America is under assault and it must be repelled by force. Yet just because Trump and allies have spent recent years normalizing this idea and making this assertion doesn’t make it any less radical. Let’s be clear, this is the adoption of a white nationalist conspiracy theory, already linked to multiple deadly acts of gun violence against civilians, which is driving federal policy and Republican agendas.
Despite the martial language and emphasis on the border and recent arrivals, make no mistake that the Trump team is planning to target long-settled immigrants and mixed-status families as part of their mass deportations. Having legal status and even citizenship is not necessarily a shield of protection. Their pledges to end immigration enforcement priorities, while making as many people as possible deportable, is a disturbing tell that their definition of ‘criminal’ will look fundamentally different from most Americans’ conceptions. Perhaps most disturbingly, the resulting fear and cruelty that will be on display is likely a feature and not a bug to those in charge.”
Additional Resources
- Note that Spanish language headlines are already picking up Trump’s threat to use an emergency declaration as cover for involving the military in mass deportations while also noting that Trump plans to build camps near urban centers. See La Opinión “Trump confirma que deportaciones masivas serán tras declarar emergencia nacional y usar al ejército” and La Opinión “Trump planea centros de detención de inmigrantes cerca de las principales ciudades.”
- Read the America’s Voice assessment of what’s to come, “Shock and Awful: Unsparing, Indiscriminate, and Costly Mass Deportations,” with 7 key points about the Trump mass deportation agenda.
Below, find America’s Voice research on the scope of Republican-allied efforts to normalize “invasion” and white nationalist conspiracy language. As AV Senior Director of Research Zachary Mueller wrote the week before the election:
“To date, Republican candidates, committees and superPACs have spent $964 million on 1,892 unique TV ads that mention immigration so far this year, according to data pulled from AdImpact. As we noted in our report last month, this spend is a massive increase over years past with over four times as much money spent on the issue than the record-breaking number in 2022 … As the Wesleyan Media Project found, 43% of all pro-Republican ads pushed immigration messages in September and 42% in August.
In this election cycle, Republican-aligned campaigns produced 3,229 Facebook/Meta ads and 1,575 emails using “border” that we have tracked. 766 of those Facebook/Meta ads and 192 email ads used the “invasion” rhetoric. There is a serious lack of transparency in digital ad spending, particularly on specific issue topics, but a joint report by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and the Wesleyan Media Project identified over $619 million on political ads on Meta and Google. Of note this total also doesn’t include the pervasive political ads on X/Twitter this cycle, though the political spend on the platform is much less than the others.
Obviously, the ads range in their ferocity towards immigrants, many – some $52 million dollars worth – have pushed the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy theory, while many more push more subtle anti-immigrant myths and themes.”
