Trump To Direct Military To Southern Border

President-elect Donald Trump plans to sign 10 executive actions shortly after taking office that will overhaul the way immigration is enforced, including directing the U.S. military to take a greater role in border security, incoming White House officials told reporters Monday.

The orders create sweeping new mandates for the Department of Defense, suspend asylum and begin the orchestration of an attack on the principle of birthright citizenship that Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Trump plans to sign an executive action that will declare a state of emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, citing the record-setting unauthorized crossings that occurred during the administration of President Joe Biden, as well as problems like drug trafficking, human smuggling and unauthorized entry of “unvetted, military-age males.”

That declaration will set the stage for tasking the U.S. military with a greater role in immigration enforcement, an incoming official said.

Under the orders, Trump will direct the Department of Defense to deploy members of the armed forces and National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border and to use military resources to complete the construction of the wall that lines much of the U.S.-Mexico border.

That role marks a radical change for the U.S. military, which historically focuses on fighting foreign combatants located nowhere near its own borders, though the National Guard has taken a growing role in border enforcement in recent years in Texas at the request of Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

The military’s new role will be justified by a mandate contained within an executive action to “maintain sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.”

The orders also will reclassify street gangs with foreign roots as irregular armed forces or foreign terrorist organizations, an incoming official said. The official referred repeatedly to Tren de Aragua — a gang that started in Venezuela and that the Trump campaign repeatedly lashed out against last year — as a potential target of those changes.

Officials repeatedly described unauthorized immigration as an “invasion.”

“Our southern border is overrun,” one official said.

The Trump administration will direct the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty in cases where unauthorized migrants are convicted of killing a law enforcement officer.

The incoming presidential administration will pair the unprecedented role of the military with an all-out attack against the everyday migrants seeking humanitarian relief who have made up the bulk of irregular crossings over the past decade.

The incoming administration plans to suspend refugee resettlement for at least the next four months and will move to suspend claims for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump plans to swiftly restore his Remain in Mexico policy, which required migrants on the southern border seeking humanitarian grounds like asylum for entering the United States to return to Mexico while their claims played out. The outgoing Biden administration halted Remain in Mexico shortly after taking office in January 2021.

Unauthorized immigration rose to a record-setting level under the Biden administration but dropped back down over the past year due to a combination of more aggressive enforcement in Mexico, expansion of legal means to enter the United States and a policy of blocking asylum claims for people who cross by land between legal ports of entry.

One executive action that Trump plans to sign will attempt to redefine birthright citizenship to exclude the children of unauthorized immigrants, though Trump himself has acknowledged in the past that attempting to challenge birthright citizenship may run afoul of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Trump also plans to sign an executive action mandating federal and state cooperation on immigration enforcement.

Local police forces routinely cooperate with federal immigration authorities to initiate deportations of unauthorized migrants taken into custody on criminal charges.

Democratic jurisdictions have limited such cooperation for more than a decade, however, contending that the criminal justice system routinely sweeps people into deportation proceedings for trivial offenses or no offense at all. Victims of domestic violence, for example, are routinely arrested after altercations that prompt police involvement.