Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
In an early morning social media post, Trump responded “TRUE!!!” to a post by Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who wrote on 8 November that the next administration “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program”.
Since his decisive victory, Trump has said he intends to make good on his campaign promise to execute mass deportations, beginning on the first day of his presidency. But many aspects of what he has described as the “largest deportation program in American history” remain unclear.
Trump has previously suggested he would rely on wartime powers, military troops and sympathetic state and local leaders. Such a sprawling campaign – and the use of military personnel to carry it out – is almost certain to draw legal challenges and pushback from Democratic leaders, some of whom have already said they would refuse to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda.
There’s quite a bit of training nowadays on how to identify and abso-fucking-lutely DO NOT follow unlawful orders, so I’d have a fair deal more faith in avoiding the napalm situation than a coin-toss… but there’s also a lot of training on if it’s a legal order you fucking FOLLOW it even if it’s really uncomfortable. …and relocating people who already don’t have a legal status doesn’t stand out as a unlawful order, so unfortunately I’d guess compliance will be around 100% on this one.
We have plenty of examples of soldiers merrily war-criming their way into history in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It doesn’t matter how many power points you watch, it doesn’t make a soldier not a soldier, and soldiers are defined by signing up to maybe do a bit of unprovoked violence.
They may or may not get punished for it later, but the sheer number of civilian casualties in both those wars makes it abundantly clear that killing civilians isn’t the hard line we like to think it is. We just need to tell the pilot that it’s a valid target, and chances are they’ll bomb that wedding.
Humans are pretty willing to do messed up stuff in war. All that training is what gets you to the point where it’s a coin toss, and not perfect willingness to engage in collective punishment, reprisal killing, intimidation murder or just plain “shooting through the windshields of cars for fun”.
The key there is unlawful. Not immoral.
They hold all the keys. Both houses, the courts, the executive branch. They will simply make whatever the fuck they want legal.