Despite best promises and herculean efforts, mass illegal immigrant deportations are not keeping up with President Trump's expectations. The solution may be to divert funds from the Department of Defense and hire civilian contractors to pick up the workload in housing, crewing return flights to homelands, and processing criminals out the door and legitimate asylum seekers in.
Border czar Tom Homan has been busy reallocating agents from the FBI, DEA, and ATF to support Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in making immigrant arrests. But is Trump robbing Peter to pay Paul?
DOD Assisted Deportations
To fully fund the most historic deportation in the nation's history, the Trump administration is considering tapping into the Department of Defense's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), which gives the Pentagon a swift avenue to issue contracts to support the logistics of any operation. Trump has also trifled with the idea of using the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In part, the laws – passed by a Federalist-controlled Congress and signed by John Adams – were designed to restrict immigration and speech. Add in the national emergency declaration, and the justification the administration is banking on is complete.
That could prove problematic, however, and the ACLU is all over it. Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said using the military to carry out deportations under the Alien and Sedition Acts would be "patently unlawful."
"The law requires an invasion by a foreign government," said Gelernt, "That's not what is happening with immigration."
All In
It's not a stretch, however, for Trump to call in the troops and allocate the funding for LOGCAP. It has been done before: "For basically the past 40 years, the military's involvement at the border has been steadily growing," said Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. "And it has gone from sort of ad hoc to routine to deeply entrenched into how we approach border security and immigration."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been on board with the Trump deportation plan since day one. "Whatever is needed at the border will be provided," Hegseth said. "The Defense Department will support the defense of the territorial integrity of the U.S. at the Southern border, to include reservists, National Guard, and active duty, in compliance with the constitution, the laws of our land, and the directives of the commander-in-chief."
In less than a month, Trump has kept his promise to focus on the southern border. The president declared a national emergency, which ordered the Secretary of Defense to "deploy additional personnel to the border, including members of the Armed Forces and the National Guard." The order also directs Homeland and Defense to finish the wall.
Earlier this week, Senate Republicans pushed ahead on a scaled-back budget bill, a $340 billion package, with earmarks for mass deportations and other administration priorities. More line items to tackle illegal immigration include $175 billion to be spent on border security and mass deportation operations and to finish the wall – a $150 billion add to the Pentagon and $20 billion for the Coast Guard.
Military involvement now "is just essentially to get access to more bodies and more aircrafts," said Nunn. "Suppose you want to set up a checkpoint on a highway in Texas or Arizona. Under normal circumstances, you need five CBP agents to run a checkpoint. If you have access to military personnel, you can run a checkpoint with one CBP agent assisted by four soldiers. Then suddenly five CBP agents assisted by soldiers can run five checkpoints instead of one."
One has to admit Trump is on to something.
