By: Stephanie Kalota
Founder, Veteran Legislative Voice & AHG Correspondent
Before winning the presidential election, former president Donald Trump had promised to enact a mass deportation plan.
First, Trump stated that this could be possible with local law enforcement. But local enforcement already reports that they are stretched too thin. Then former president Trump said that he would use the military instead. However, this could be in breach of an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the government from using the military for civil law enforcement. There is an exception, Congress must override the act.
Originally, this law only applied to the Army, but further updates included the rest of the services except for the Guard and Coast Guard. That is because of Representative Adam Schiff, who introduced the amendment, and it was included in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. This law is also applicable to anyone within the United States, not just citizens.
This act has been amended to include a few allowances to use the military in civil law enforcement. For example, in 1981, Congress enacted legislation that the military could cooperate with civil law enforcement when it came to the war on drugs. In that instance, the military collects information and uses military equipment to track drug lawbreakers.
You may ask, what about Texas and the guard being used there? Well, the Guard is except, but the National Guard members are also just part of the support part of the border operations. This isn’t the first time former president Trump tried to use the military for domestic purposes. He attempted to use them during the George Floyd protests, and he also diverted almost 10 billion dollars of the military’s budget to the border wall. Sadly, most of that money cannot be returned to the military.
The American Immigration Council estimates that this could cost up to 88 billion per year, which is more than 10x ICE’s budget. It’s also almost a trillion dollars over ten years.
This budget would include more ICE agents, Trump stated he wanted to hire 10k new agents. ICE currently has 20,000 personnel. To follow through with this plan, there will need to be a mass amount of logistics, like facilities to hold those arrested, training, equipment, vehicles, etc. If former President Trump plans to use the military, the government will have to pay for their transportation (lodging, food, air/driving expenses, rental cars), their training (because there aren’t enough military police service members to go around so I imagine they will cross train non-MP types to do it), etc. There is a possibility that Trump could use the military in support services when it comes to the mass deportation plan to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act.
The use of the military can be also complicated because there is a portion of the military that is made of immigrants. Per the Immigration Learning Center, “There are an estimated 45,000 immigrants actively serving in the U.S. military, which requires them to be permanent legal residents and can offer a path to citizenship. Around 5,000 permanent residents enlist each year…”
Either way, this could be a sticky situation that would lead to endless forms of conflict.
