Trump backs up talk of using US military to enforce mass deportations
Donald Trump gave the nod on social media this morning to the notion that he wants to use the military to enforce his previously-stated intentions for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants from the US once he gets into office.
The Republican president-elect talked on the election campaign trail about declaring a national emergency in order to trigger powers that would facilitate a rare and highly controversial move to engage the US military to help deport millions of people he deems to be in the US illegally.
Trump responded “TRUE” in an early-morning post on his own platform, Truth Social, after a conservative activist had said he heard such reports.
Tom Fitton, the president of the influential conservative group Judicial Watch, had posted: “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Trump reposted with his own comment, “true”, appearing to confirm.
Key events
Eric Hovde, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has conceded the race to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in a video message.
In the message, Hovde, who lost to Baldwin by about 29,000 votes, said that he would not request a recount of the vote but expressed concerns about the election process and alleged “many troubling issues” related to absentee ballots in Milwaukee.
His claims of impropriety have been refuted by Republicans, Democrats and non-partisan election leaders.
In the video message Hovde said that “without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose, because you will just be recounting the same ballots, regardless of their integrity”.
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said that the process of selecting someone to fill Florida senator Marco Rubio’s seat has begun and that a selection will likely be made by the beginning of January.
In a statement on Monday, DeSantis said that Rubio is expected to resign from the Senate to assume duties as secretary of state when the Trump administration takes power on January 20th.
Under Florida law, DeSantis is tasked with appointing Rubio’s successor.
“We have already received strong interest from several possible candidates, and we continue to gather names of additional candidates and conduct preliminary vetting” DeSantis said. “More extensive vetting and candidate interviews will be conducted over the next few weeks.”
The day so far
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Donald Trump gave the nod on social media this morning to the notion that he wants to use the military to enforce his previously-stated intentions for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants from the US once he gets into office.
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Conservative strategist Steve Bannon was due to go to trial next month on state charges in New York of conspiring to dupe donors to build a border wall but a judge said this morning that Bannon won’t face trial until February.
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There are reports of clashes among top Trump insiders over leadership picks.
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According to reports, Linda McMahon, a former Small Business Administration (SBA) director, is expected to be announced as Trump’s secretary of commerce.
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Trump picked Brendan Carr, Project 2025 co-author, to lead FCC as speculation over treasury secretary appointment mounts.
Steve Bannon did not turn up in person to attend the latest hearing in his court case in New York City today, on state charges of conspiring to dupe donors to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
Instead, he listened in virtually as the judge, April Newbauer, set 25 February for jury selection, postponing it from December.
Bannon did not speak except to say, “yes, ma’am” when asked whether he understood he must be in court on the new date, the Associated Press reported.
The judge delayed the trial date from 9 December after deciding to let the future jurors hear evidence that some of the wall charity’s money went to pay a more than $600,000 credit card debt that a separate Bannon-related not-for-profit organization had racked up in 2019.
Prosecutors wanted to introduce it and defense lawyers argued unsuccessfully that it was irrelevant.
Bannon denies the charges, including conspiracy and money laundering. Manhattan prosecutors brought the case after Donald Trump pardoned Bannon in a similar federal prosecution that was in its early stages, where Bannon had denied pocketing over $1m from the We Build the Wall outfit.
Newbauer has yet to rule on whether jurors’ names will be kept confidential, as the prosecution has requested.
Bannon trial over Mexico wall funding ‘con’ delayed
Conservative strategist Steve Bannon is not long out of prison after serving a sentence for defying multiple subpoenas related to the House’s January 6 insurrection investigation.
But he has another case hanging over him, which just got pushed back a little on the legal calendar.
Bannon, the enduring populist who was a central feature in Donald Trump’s first election campaign and term in office, was due to go to trial next month on state charges in New York of conspiring to dupe donors who gave to a private enterprise that pledged to use the funds to speed up the construction of sections of barrier at the US-Mexico border.
A judge, April Newbauer, said this morning that Bannon now won’t face trial until February. In court in New York prosecutors asked for the jury to be anonymous, the Associated Press reports.
Bannon chaired the advisory board of the group called We Build the Wall. Brian Kolfage, the co-founder of the We Build the Wall fundraising group, was sentenced in 2023 to more than four years in prison after admitting to conspiring to defraud donors.
While president, Trump pardoned Bannon on related federal charges, but the state charges stand. Bannon has denied the charges.
In his first term in office, Trump used the authority of the National Emergencies Act to justify transferring $2.5bn from military construction projects to build new segments of barrier at the US-Mexico border, which a federal appeals court later deemed an illegal diversion of funds.
Mexico never paid for “the wall”, as Trump had repeatedly promised. He declared a national emergency because of people migrating across the US-Mexico border without authorization, seeking refuge in the US.
William Banks, professor at Syracuse University and founding director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, told ABC earlier this month: “We don’t like uniform military in our domestic affairs at all. The default is always have the civilians do it. The cops, the state police, the city police, the sheriffs.”
Banks told the network that the federal government calling in troops to enforce something like a mass deportation program would be a huge upheaval in the US, including that troops are not trained in regular law enforcement and the legal ins and outs of carrying out civilian arrests.
And he warned against the threat of extremist action from Trump in federalizing and deploying the national guard in an anti-immigration crackdown.
“It would turn our whole society upside down … all these arguments about him being an autocrat or dictator, it is not a stretch,” Banks told ABC.
As well as the implications for democracy, experts said, mass deportation would also be enormously expensive and complicated, to say nothing of the human toll on millions of undocumented families living and working in the US. Some say it would be an “economic disaster” too, and severely disrupt food supply chains.
Military units in the US are broadly not permitted to engage in law enforcement domestically and this is considered a strong element of American tradition.
The Brennan Center for Justice points to the 143-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which “bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement” while noting, crucially, “except when expressly authorized by law” and says there are “dangerous gaps in the law’s coverage” which it wants the US Congress to address.
When the National Guard, which most typically operates under control of a state, is called into federal service it is then covered by the Posse Comitus Act. But the Brennan Center says that the most important statutory exception to the act that allows a president to use federal troops for domestic enforcement is the Insurrection Act. “The Insurrection Act allows the president to use the military to enforce federal law,” the center says, adding that: “In the summer of 2020, President Trump deployed the DC National Guard into Washington to police mostly peaceful protests against law enforcement brutality and racism.”
The act gives a president broad powers to direct the National Guard.
US law is generally designed to prevent presidents from using the US military to enforce domestic law and order and any action by Donald Trump to deploy troops in a mass deportation program will cause huge political and legal waves.
Trump said on the campaign trail that on the first day of his administration he would launch the largest deportation program in American history. He’s talked of deploying the US military against opponents, against election chaos and to enforce deportations, all highly controversial.
The group Protect Democracy says the following on its website: “A central hallmark of American democracy is that, with tightly limited exceptions, the US military is not used here at home. Autocrats often deploy military force to quash dissent, target vulnerable communities, and corrupt elections. Such outbreaks can offer political cover for restrictions on civil liberties or the expansion of coercive security measures …
“Congress has passed statutory constraints on domestic deployment that go beyond what is required by the Constitution, intended to prevent the chief executive from abusing the awesome power of the military – overseas or, especially, on American streets.”
Justo Robles
Fear immediately began rippling through undocumented communities across the US when Donald Trump won the election and as he prepares to take the White House, after promising record deportations during an election campaign filled with xenophobic hate speech – and after his first term in office was marked by anti-immigration crackdowns.
With Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, he’s expected to fulfill his campaign pledge to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented people “in US history”.
He frequently calls people crossing the US-Mexico border without authorization “an invasion”, including those requesting asylum from oppression, war, gang violence, domestic violence or climate crisis-driven poverty, referring to the US as “an occupied country”, and falsely blaming migrants for crime and economic woes.
Many families in the US now face being torn apart. There are at least 11 million undocumented people living in the US, according to the Pew Research Center. As of 2022, about 4.4 million US-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent.
It’s estimated that a million deportations a year could cost $967.9bn in federal spending over a decade, according to the American Immigration Council, which would require congressional approval and trigger an “economic disaster”.
Trump told Time magazine earlier this year: “If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military.”
Trump backs up talk of using US military to enforce mass deportations
Donald Trump gave the nod on social media this morning to the notion that he wants to use the military to enforce his previously-stated intentions for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants from the US once he gets into office.
The Republican president-elect talked on the election campaign trail about declaring a national emergency in order to trigger powers that would facilitate a rare and highly controversial move to engage the US military to help deport millions of people he deems to be in the US illegally.
Trump responded “TRUE” in an early-morning post on his own platform, Truth Social, after a conservative activist had said he heard such reports.
Tom Fitton, the president of the influential conservative group Judicial Watch, had posted: “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Trump reposted with his own comment, “true”, appearing to confirm.
The Guardian is covering the latest news from the war in Ukraine in one of our global live blogs, including all the fallout from the US move under President Joe Biden to allow Ukraine to conduct strikes with US-made weapons deep into sovereign Russian territory.
The news, which emerged yesterday, has brought a furious reaction from the Kremlin. Follow the news as it unfolds, here.
Just a reminder that top Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn was among 18 people charged by a grand jury in Arizona over his alleged involvement in the scheme to create a slate of false electors for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
This included 11 people who served as those fake electors and seven Trump allies, among them Epshteyn, who aided the scheme.
Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, announced the charges in April, and said the 11 fake electors had been charged with felonies for fraud, forgery and conspiracy.
Charged with aiding in the scheme were: Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Mike Roman.
The indictment said: “In Arizona, and the United States, the people elected Joseph Biden as president on November 3 2020. Unwilling to accept this fact, defendants and unindicted co-conspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep unindicted co-conspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters. This scheme would have deprived Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted.”
Epshteyn has pleaded not guilty. The case is due to go to trial in January, 2026.
Shares in Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, rose nearly 7% in trading before the bell in the US today, after Bloomberg News reported that president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team was planning to set up federal regulations for autonomous vehicles.
The report comes days after Trump named Musk, the automaker’s CEO, as a co-head of the incoming administration’s new government efficiency department, Reuters reports.
Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as “incredibly painful”, weeks after unveiling a two-seat “Cybercab” robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.
Trump’s team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
A unified federal regulation could streamline this (approval process), allowing Tesla to push forward more rapidly with FSD [full self driving] testing,” said Mamta Valechha, analyst at Quilter Cheviot.
However, the regulation is not the primary barrier holding Tesla back at the moment, it’s the company’s FSD driver assistance technology that is still not fully autonomous and requires driver supervision.
