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.
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.
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.
It’s pretty wild to watch military footage through the lens of “what if those were cops, and what if the people they were engaging were civilians…?” and realizing that the military shows a relative shit-ton of restraint. Soo many times where the military folks see like a hand reach back into a pocket they can’t see - and they’ll react, by tensing up and getting a hand on their weapon or something… and that’s it… and out comes a wallet from the other dude, military folks understand there’s no threat, and the situation never escalates.
Cops? Dude would have 4 clips unloaded into him by 3 people.
I know cops have their own version of rules of engagement - probable cause and such - but they kinda just don’t give a fuck.
Don’t get me wrong, the military is fucked up in a lot of ways - I was there, it’s fucking bad - but it’s not that kind of bad.