Donald Trump has vowed to begin his mass deportations program on his first day in office, and confirmed early Monday morning he plans to declare a "national emergency" and use "military assets" to achieve his goal of removing "millions" of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” Trump told supporters during his infamous Madison Square Garden rally last month.
But deporting millions is not the president-elect's only anti-immigration goal.
Trump's incoming White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, who is the architect of the "zero tolerance" family separation program in his first term, has bigger plans.
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Miller, according The New York Times, has said that "military funds would be used to build 'vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers' for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries."
The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) would be in charge of the facilities, which The Times has called "camps."
"The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim," according to The Times.
That concept aligns with what The Times in July described as "The Right-Wing Dream of ‘Self-Deportation’."
"Trump has said he would build 'vast holding facilities' — detention camps — to lock people up as their cases progress; end birthright citizenship, even though the Constitution protects it; and bring back a version of the travel ban from his first term, which barred visitors from several mostly Muslim countries. Another Trump promise, mass deportations, hasn’t been tried since the 1950s; now, polls show majority support for it, including among Latinos," The Times had reported over the summer.
"Self-deportation," or, "provoking immigrants to leave of their own volition," as The Times described it, "has gone out of fashion but the idea continues to lurk."
"This time, instead of directly pressuring undocumented adults to flee, some immigration opponents are threatening access to school for their children. It’s a nuclear option — requiring the reversal of a Supreme Court ruling that has been a linchpin of educational rights for four decades — that some of Trump’s allies on the right are quietly building support for."
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The Times reports there are 600,000 undocumented children in the U.S., and "another 4.5 million have a parent who is here illegally."
Tom Homan, Trump's incoming "border czar," has said that rather than breaking up families, "families could be deported together," presumably even if some members are U.S. citizens:
Trump's team "also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years."
And in another example of the Trump team appearing to want to make life in the United States unbearable for the undocumented, The Times reported Monday the Trump administration plans to "stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship."
Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis last week said, "Birthright citizenship is a foundational concept in American constitutional law. It is a betrayal of the 14th Amendment to suggest otherwise or that it can be discarded with ease. We settled any doubt about this in Wong Kim Ark in 1898. We should not budge one solitary inch."
But Trump himself has declared, "going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship."
That would, as Professor Kreis notes, directly contradicts the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also bans Americans who "have engaged in insurrection" from holding office.
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