A cornerstone of President-elect Donald Trump's second-term agenda is the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. And his recent call to use emergency powers to deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil is now being publicly slammed by a top Senate Republican.
Earlier this week, Trump said on his Truth Social platform that he would make a national emergency declaration that would allow for the military to be called up to assist his administration with mass deportations. And his nominations of immigration hard-liners like South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary and his former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan as border czar signal that his Cabinet would be taking an especially radical approach to undocumented immigrants.
But on Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on the far-right network Newsmax that he would not be in favor of Trump deputizing the military to serve as his deportation force. He maintained that the people carrying out Trump's deportations need to be part of a "police enforcement domestic agency," rather than U.S. military personnel.
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"I'm not in favor of sending the army in uniforms, into our cities, to collect people. I think it’s a terrible image and that’s not what we use our military for,” he said.
“We never have. And it's actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities. [The] Army and our military are trained to shoot the enemy. They're not trained to get a warrant to do what they're doing ... I'm all for remain in Mexico. I will not support an emergency to put the Army into our cities, I think that's a huge mistake."
Paul is likely referring to the Posse Comitatus Act, which was passed in the 19th century to prevent federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement affairs. As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, the lone exception to the Posse Comitatus Act is the Insurrection Act, which a president can invoke with or without the consent of a state government to suppress a rebellion.
The idea for using the military to assist with mass deportations originally came from Russ Vought, who is the founder of the Center for Renewing America (one of the partner organizations supporting the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025). According to a Washington Post profile of Vought published earlier this year, he proposed characterizing the influx of undocumented immigrants as a foreign "invasion" that would require deploying the military as a means of fighting back, claiming wartime powers.
"We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote in a September 2022 essay.
“This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”
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However, Sen. Paul's public objection to the idea means that Trump could face significant resistance in Congress not just from Democrats, but also from Republicans. And there's a possibility that the plan could also be ruled unconstitutional by the federal judiciary if human rights groups fight it in court.
