In the 2024 election, one of Donald Trump’s primary campaign promises was to get control of the nation’s borders and conduct mass deportations of illegal aliens, beginning with known criminals and bad actors. Now these deportations will be a massive undertaking; nothing of the sort has been attempted since the Eisenhower administration, and if this is going to happen, it will be one of the largest logistical flexes the United States has ever carried out.
To help pull this off, President-elect Trump’s (still not tired of writing that) pick for border czar, Tom “The Hammer” Homan, is now looking into some help from the armed forces – not for enforcement, but for logistics, including detention centers and transport, according to a new WSJ interview.
Donald Trump’s team is looking at using military bases to detain migrants and military planes to boost deportations, the president-elect’s incoming border czar Tom Homan said.
“It’s something that’s certainly on the table,” Homan said Friday in a wide-ranging interview, adding that specific plans haven’t been drawn up yet. “We’re waiting to see what Congress is going to give us for funding.”
Trump’s team plans to declare a national emergency on immigration on day one of his presidency, Trump has confirmed, which would allow the administration to divert money from the Pentagon for immigration purposes. Military troops can’t by law make arrests on U.S. soil, but Trump’s immigration advisers hope they can provide assistance in other ways to drive up deportations. The president-elect’s promised mass-deportation effort was a major pillar of his campaign.
Before the left gets all spun up about “OMG CONCENTRATION CAMPS” it’s important to note that this has been done before, and under the Obama and Biden administrations, at that:
President Biden and former President Barack Obama used military bases for immigration purposes, to hold large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children who had crossed the border before releasing them to family members. Biden also housed evacuees from Afghanistan on bases as refugee agencies worked to find them more permanent homes.
Some Haitian and Cuban migrants were also detained on military bases in the 1980s and 1990s. But no effort has been made to round up people living in the U.S. en masse since the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower. Trump’s potential use of military assets could be more expansive.
There are also legal issues; the U.S. military is barred by statute from conducting law-enforcement operations within the United States, under the Posse Comitatus Act – which does include an exemption from using such forces if authorized by Congress.
This needn’t be an issue, though. The military could be used, as it was during the Obama and Biden administrations, to provide logistical support.
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And, make no mistake, a great deal of logistical support will be needed. Even if, as Tom Homan states, the effort begins with the identification, detention, and deportation of known criminals, people on terror watch lists, and the like, we are still talking about tens of thousands of people. These illegal immigrants must be located and apprehended, which should be done by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal officials. But once that is done, these people must be housed, fed, and then, in turn, transported to their countries of origin.
Those are things the military can support.
To keep his campaign promise, Donald Trump will have to oversee one of the largest logistical exercises that the federal government has carried out in many years. But the United States armed forces are trained and equipped to carry out just such a large-scale operation. If they can legally be used as a force multiplier to help ICE and the Border Patrol focus on their respective tasks, then this is something the administration should be looking into.
