At 4:03 a.m. ET, the President-elect was online. He was thinking about “military assets” and mass deportations.
Tom Fitton, the right-wing activist and Judicial Watch leader, had written a post on the incoming President’s proprietary social network, Truth Social, saying citing “reports” that the new administration was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
“TRUE!!!,” Trump wrote in response in a pre-sunrise post.
It’s the first seeming confirmation since the election that Trump wants to see the U.S. military deployed domestically.
Using the military domestically — absent any crisis remotely needed to prompt or justify such a move — would break with centuries of practice in the United States, giving a President who has promised to deploy troops against the “enemy from within” the most powerful, and potentially unconstrained, tool in the federal arsenal.
But in this case, the prospect of domestic deployment is tied to Trump’s plans for “mass deportations.” And it’s not clear from Fitton’s post what Trump really means.
For one, it repeats a theme of the MAGA right’s approach to this issue: Conflating the border with interior immigration enforcement.
Deploying the military along the U.S.-Mexico border would be extreme but would remain within the bounds of a core military mission. The Pentagon already provides support to the border patrol and other agencies that monitor the southern border.
But using the military to conduct mass deportations — a law enforcement task that takes place in interior — would involve U.S. soldiers deploying across the country, a breach without any recent precedent in American history.
For Trump, the lack of seriousness or specifics here is tangled up with the broader point: he wants “military assets,” whatever that may mean, in the United States. And, he wants you to know about it.
Policy shops staffed with officials from Trump’s first administration spent much of the once and future President’s time in the political wilderness drafting plans for domestic deployment of the military. One piece invoked War on Terror-era legal justifications to argue that the President could use active duty soldiers to conduct domestic immigration enforcement.
The post that Trump was reacting to is a mishmash of legal and political concepts.
Fitton referenced invoking a national emergency to use military assets. But it’s not clear that the National Emergencies Act is the provision that would allow Trump to use the military for anything at all. In 2019, Trump invoked it to gain access to funding to build sections of a wall along the southern border. The wall played a somewhat analogous role in Trump’s 2016 campaign to the promise of mass deportations in 2024.
The National Emergencies Act is not what’s been keeping national security and military law attorneys up at night. Rather, it’s the Insurrection Act that has caused the most worry.
Under that law, Trump has broad, virtually unchecked ability to deploy troops domestically. He considered invoking it in response to the 2020 George Floyd protests, purportedly asking at one point why soldiers don’t “just shoot” protestors.
“It essentially lets you use federal military personnel to do anything that a federal law enforcement officer could do,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel at the Brennan Center, told TPM before the election.
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