If Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he plans to institute an immigration-system overhaul that would involve designating drug cartels as “unlawful enemy combatants” so that military force could be used against them.
Trump is reportedly considering deploying Coast Guard and Navy assets throughout American and Latin American waters to deter drug smuggling and would even permit the military to engage with suspected targets on Mexican soil.
The latter point was echoed by Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr in an interview on Monday for National Review. “There were 80,000 ISIS [militants] controlling a large territory in the Middle East, and we had a couple thousand special forces as well as local supporting groups such as the Kurds.”
“Over time, we were able to destroy them. Now, a lot of that included bombing targets, and I’m not suggesting we do that here, but the ability to use special operations and precision operations against what are paramilitary forces will allow us to reduce them in pretty short order.”
“For those passionate about securing our immigration system, the first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss — followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable,” former Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Axios, which first reported the plan.
As president, Trump would also begin making use of a federal law that allows for the disqualification of prospective immigrants with Marxist sympathies.
While the Biden administration has taken a dim view of Texas governor Greg Abbott’s construction of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande River, under Trump, the White House would reverse course and embrace the initiative. In July, the Department of Justice announced its intentions to sue Abbott over the novel border measure, which makes it more difficult for illegal immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande river.
“We write to inform you,” Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim and U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza wrote in a Thursday letter to Governor Greg Abbott and Interim Attorney General Angela Colmenero, “that the United States intends to file [a] legal action in relation to the State of Texas’s unlawful construction of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande River.”
“The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” the letter stated. If Texas fails to “expeditiously remove” the structure, “the United States intends to file legal action.”
Among the other proposals Trump is seemingly considering is the reimposition of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health policy used to curb illegal migration, as well as completing over 1,500 miles of new border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The new plan would rush “people through the system, stripping due process protections from them, eliminating any access to legal services, and really transforming this into an assembly line deportation machine,” one researcher with the American Immigration Council warned Axios.
“It is the QAnon-ization of border policy. We are seeing a lot more talk about the border as a hub for child sex trafficking, even though there is effectively no evidence.”