If you thought his first term was bad, wait until you see what he’s plotting for round two.
By Edith Olmsted | The New Republic | AUG. 21, 2023
Donald Trump is reportedly planning an immigration crackdown that would make his first stint in the White House look tame.
Axios reports that Trump, if elected in 2024, is planning to increase ideological screenings of immigrants to prevent “Marxists” from entering, to designate drug cartels as “unlawful enemy combatants,” and to expand the “Muslim ban” to more countries.
“For those passionate about securing our immigration system ... the first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss—followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable,” Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant architect of Trump’s first term, told Axios.
Designating drug cartels as “unlawful enemy combatants” would provide a legal justification for the United States military to target them in Mexico—or so Trump imagines. It would also significantly raise tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, to say the least.
Trump also plans to complete his precious border wall, grow the dangerous floating barriers in the Rio Grande, deploy the Coast Guard and Navy to create a sea blockade to stop drug smugglers, and end “birthright citizenship” for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants. These ideas and more stand a better chance of surviving court challenges given that the Supreme Court has become even more conservative since Trump’s first term.
Trump hopes to use the Alien Enemies Act—a long-forgotten section of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—to quickly deport gang members, smugglers, and criminals by claiming a border “invasion” and designating people from certain countries as “alien enemies.” He also wants to make it easier to deport people and would use the FBI, DEA, and perhaps even the National Guard to find undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s plan would rush “people through the system, stripping due process protections from them, eliminating any access to legal services, and really transforming this into an assembly line deportation machine,” the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told Axios.
