Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

In 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”.

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.

  • toiletobserver
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    1025 days ago

    Deport everyone who arrived after 1350AD and their descendents. Make America native again

    • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      245 days ago

      The sad part is, first nations folks don’t even want to do this, they serve in the armed forces at very high rates, I don’t mean it’s sad they are very much American, I mean it’s sad that they have more respect on average for other Americans than people have respect for them.

      • ThePowerOfGeek
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        215 days ago

        Yup. Remember that right wing asshole candidate who yelled at a native American lady to ‘go back there she came from’? You can bet he will be gleeful about these plans.

        These people are totally lacking in any self-awareness or sense of history.

    • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      24 days ago

      Seems arbitrary, as a date. Deport everyone whose ancestors immigrated. That’s the ‘first’ nations, too.

      • toiletobserver
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        34 days ago

        Not entirely arbitrary. I tried to pick a date before the majority of Europeans immigrated. The goal was to point out the absurdity of the original idea by taking it to an extreme.

      • @empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        The joke is time travel i guess; everything the Nazi’s pioneered is being not-so-slowly parroted by Trump and crew like its new again, when its really not…

  • @Retreaux@lemmy.world
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    245 days ago

    The It Could Happen Here podcast pointed out that the sheer amount of financial maneuvering to pull this off would not be an insignificant amount, from detention centers to staffing, etc. Not that it’s an impossible task but it’s a lot bigger to pull off than bOtH SiDeS tend to think.

    • @prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 days ago

      Well Texas just offered Trump the land for it. So that covers that (though I’m sure he’ll find a way to get taxpayers to pay for it and take a cut)

    • ThePowerOfGeek
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      65 days ago

      I’m not sure how much of a financial burden the staffing side will actually be. Trump’s campaign has been going around the heartland for 2-3 years, gathering up the names of eager supporters who want to help him in any way possible.

      I’m pretty sure if those volunteers are told they will a) be helping Dear Leader, b) be given unchecked powers to torment and intimidate Latinos/Latinas, they will leap at the opportunity. And they will probably happily pay for any accommodation and food out if their own pocket.

  • @CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    215 days ago

    Also, how will this reverse prices back to the “good old days” of donvict’s first tenure?

    I mean, I’m using my entire paycheck up on a dozen eggs, or so “JD” “Vance” told me.

    • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      It will destroy the economy, entire sectors of commerce will end, and Trump was trying to shut down all trade from the southern boarder entirely his whole last term, no matter how many times his staff told him billions of dollars in trade cross the boarder every single day. If he dosen’t have people in place willing to tell him no. Which he’s getting really good at placing yes men everywhere, then he’ll probably do that as well, and might do it with flights and trains from the south of the US as well. If that happens and he’s dumping billions into depopulating the US by 22mil the US is going see the worst economic disaster in our history by several magnitudes. Maybe enough protesters get organized and strategically block road for long enough to actually slow them down, but with the US military I don’t see that happening.

    • peopleproblems
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      55 days ago

      Imagine you create a world where currency becomes less and less valuable. Essentially it becomes worthless.

      Debts, will, of course, soar out of control. Trump, banks, private equity, mortgages, etc. Everyone is underwater.

      How do people eat? How do people get medical care? How do people have shelter? Why it’s easy of course. The Party provides. “But wait that’s communism!” Hold on there buddy, communism is collectivism. This isn’t collectivism, this is fascism. The Government takes control of failing businesses, and decides who continues to be rich and who doesn’t. Workers are provided new “currency” tied to essentially paying the owners of everything the right to work, eat, be sheltered, and get medicine. In exchange, they do exactly what they are told. If you step out of line, well, there is a camp for that.

      “They couldn’t enforce such a thing.” China and Russia already have. I would not call it successful, at some point it will fail rapidly and harshly, Fascism always does.

      There is no end game here. The intent is absolute power. The consequences aren’t important for those that obtain the power during their lifetime.

  • peopleproblems
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    145 days ago

    I don’t think this will work the way he expects. While he has the ‘legal’ authority to take command of a State’s National Guard, there is absolutely no way a single one of the governors would allow this. The red states may allow the military into their bluer cities, but the Democrat governors have largely already said they’ll refuse it.

    The largest issue is that the “Mass Deportations” don’t forcibly remove people from the country. They have to process where they all get sent. Guess where they concentrate the immigrants? Guess what happens when those facilities get too full to use them as a cheap source of labor or keep them fed?

    • Skeezix
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      44 days ago

      Guess who’s fault it will be when the price of strawberries goes up.

    • @ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      395 days ago

      We don’t have a lot of reason to think that the military wouldn’t comply. We have a handful of examples of troops refusing orders from very close in the command hierarchy to commit overt inarguable war crimes. We have more examples to the contrary.

      If they get the order from someone just up the chain to torch a subdivision and napalm the children, it’s a coin toss. If it’s the presidents policy, and they’re just relocating people? Bit risky not to comply.

      Is this uncharitable to the troops that a lot of people have high ideals will behave morally as regards legal and illegal orders? Most definitely. But also, they napalm civilian targets, torch villages and have literally rounded up Americans and our them in camps before, without due process. It’s not even a novel situation.

      • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        135 days ago

        There’s quite a bit of training nowadays on how to identify and abso-fucking-lutely DO NOT follow unlawful orders, so I’d have a fair deal more faith in avoiding the napalm situation than a coin-toss… but there’s also a lot of training on if it’s a legal order you fucking FOLLOW it even if it’s really uncomfortable. …and relocating people who already don’t have a legal status doesn’t stand out as a unlawful order, so unfortunately I’d guess compliance will be around 100% on this one.

        • @ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          155 days ago

          We have plenty of examples of soldiers merrily war-criming their way into history in Iraq and Afghanistan.
          It doesn’t matter how many power points you watch, it doesn’t make a soldier not a soldier, and soldiers are defined by signing up to maybe do a bit of unprovoked violence.
          They may or may not get punished for it later, but the sheer number of civilian casualties in both those wars makes it abundantly clear that killing civilians isn’t the hard line we like to think it is. We just need to tell the pilot that it’s a valid target, and chances are they’ll bomb that wedding.

          Humans are pretty willing to do messed up stuff in war. All that training is what gets you to the point where it’s a coin toss, and not perfect willingness to engage in collective punishment, reprisal killing, intimidation murder or just plain “shooting through the windshields of cars for fun”.

          • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            Soldiers are humans, and the average human is an evil sack of shit, so yeah there will always be new atrocities. The immigrant thing doesn’t really come down to the individual soldier though, it comes down to military leadership acting on or ignoring an order from Trump… and that outlook doesn’t leave me much hope, cuz military leadership doesn’t give a fuck about doing the right thing, just the legal thing.

            • @ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              25 days ago

              I mean, the human will to evil and the military leadership being willing to listen to political evil are in alignment in this case. So if the military is ordered to do some camps, they’re gonna do some camps.

              You just always here a lot of talk about how much the military is focused on not doing atrocities, and it’s tossed out as a knowing trump card whenever talk of the military doing stuff on US soil comes up.
              “The army would never torch a subdivision in Milwaukee, the houses look like their houses, the people look like them, and they get too much training telling them not to evil in specific ways in specific contexts”. It misses that the same people who explained the rules are the ones who’ll be telling them to do the evil, and that our soldiers aren’t better or worse than any other, morally. And soldiers regularly do evil in places that look like their homes, to people who look like their families.

              The integrity of the military is just not a barrier to them being used to do bad things ™ domestically.

              • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                Yeah for sure - lawful orders only matter if the law is moral, and historically… yeah…

                This is one of the examples where I don’t think lawful order training will make a huge difference.

                That said, illegal immigrants - even if they’re just as bad a Fox paints them (WHICH IS BULLSHIT), they’re still not a tactical threat, so if there’s any hope from a military perspective of leadership not being on board, it’ll be from a priority standpoint. …which ofc hinges on military leadership not all being replaced with Trump loyalists, so even that’s a short term hope.

                Even with all that though, domestically I’m not really worried about the military; it’s the cops I’m worried about. Trump already has a massive, religiously loyal, heavily armed goon squad in every single city in the US. And secondary to them are all the civilian Trumpanzees who’ll respond without question to his stochastic domestic terrorism. This country’s fucked well ahead of military involvement.

                • @ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                  23 days ago

                  Definitely agree 100%.

                  The cop thing is weird. In all the cases where (extremist) people talk about wanting to use the military that would normally be handled by the police, like crowd control, detaining large numbers of people, or systematic checkpoints and door to do searches, I’d actually prefer the military to the cops. Not because they’ll push back or violate civil liberties any less, but because military training is consistent and actually happens, so when someone shoves them at a checkpoint the training they regress to will be at least of a higher baseline quality than the average cop.

        • @empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          175 days ago

          The key there is unlawful. Not immoral.

          They hold all the keys. Both houses, the courts, the executive branch. They will simply make whatever the fuck they want legal.

    • @Wrench@lemmy.world
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      44 days ago

      Trump is already planning on introducing a mechanism to fire generals he doesn’t like. A review board consisting of retired generals. I don’t know what would be required to pass that, but I assume a simple majority in House / Senate, plus a predetermined ruling in the inevitable SCOTUS challenge, will certainly go his way.

      You (not you personally) chuckle fucks didn’t vote against this. Great fucking job.

    • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      75 days ago

      On this? I would assume so. I don’t think there’s a constitutional conflict unfortunately ethnic clensing is very much legal in the US framework, unless Biden spent significant amounts of time hiding legal prohibitions on ethnic clensing all over the place, it’s still very legal. It’s still legal for the US to forcibly sterilize anyone they can claim a biological flaw against. It’s still legal to put people in concentration camps based on race, ethnicity, and national origin going back two generations. No one even cares that the last time Trump was in office ICE was forcing hysterectomies on asylum seekers of all ages with no medical justification.

  • Noxy
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    155 days ago

    how bout you deport your own ass to the polluted swamp that first congealed you

  • GladiusB
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    105 days ago

    How? I just don’t see this as a feasible course of action.

    • @athairmor@lemmy.world
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      185 days ago

      Isn’t it illegal to use the military internally? The National Guard, maybe. But, they answer to the state government.

      He’ll have pushback if not outright mutiny from the military if he tries to use them against civilians, citizens or not.

      • @Mirshe@lemmy.world
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        295 days ago

        Ahh, but this is why he’s already forming a board to throw out any officers that are brash enough to get in his way, bypassing official channels. The endgame, as I see it, is a complete reorganization of the command structure, ending with something that looks like Russia, where specific orders come directly from the top of the government all the way down the chain, to squad-level sometimes. This gets rid of the extremely effective tactical flexibility that made the US so effective in WWII, but it also makes it so you can just axe any part of that totem pole that’s stupid enough to get in your way without much problem.

        • @tyler@programming.dev
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          25 days ago

          I don’t know much about military structure, but this sure does sound like something straight out of Putin’s book to make the US weaker, weak enough to attack.

          Not that it would have any chance, but Putin’s a moron anyway so.

          • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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            55 days ago

            Fascism is an excellent way to weaken a country. Strong centralized government is very important, but it needs to be an effective government, not one stupid asshole. When its 1000s of technocrats it works very well.

          • @CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            If we are in the middle of an active shooting civil war as a consequence of this, it sure would have a chance. Also, the qons seem to be in their pockets anyway.

      • @minnow@lemmy.world
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        85 days ago

        Why do you think his first order of business is to court martial anybody who he thinks won’t do his bidding?

    • @Bieren@lemmy.world
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      85 days ago

      Simple. Door to door searches. Just like some European country in the 1930s. This will go over great until people start knocking on the doors of his worshippers.

      That, or like almost everything else he says, there is no detailed thought applied.

      • GladiusB
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        15 days ago

        That is a lot of work for very little benefit. I doubt they will do anything other than waste money and not care about the environment.

    • @14th_cylon@lemm.eeOP
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      5 days ago

      Decisive is winning popular vote, winning all swing states and having control of white house, congress and supreme court.

      • @eran_morad@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        Agree with you to an extent, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. That 2% will be mighty pissed when eggs cost $1 each and a head of lettuce is $12.75 on sale (but you better not have left your loyalty card at home). If our institutions hold (big if), the coming popular revolt could be formidable.