The New York Times is reporting that President-elect Trump is considering building “vast holding facilities” where illegals would have to stay while awaiting progress on their cases and to aid with deportation.
Here’s what they write:
In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.
The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, he said.
One major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.
The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.
Mr. Trump’s team said it had developed a multifaceted plan to significantly increase the number of deportations, which it thought could be accomplished without new legislation from Congress, although it anticipated legal challenges.
Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.
The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.
And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.
Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.”
Mr. Homan told The New York Times in 2023 that he had met with Mr. Trump shortly after the now president-elect announced that he would seek office again. During that meeting, Mr. Homan said, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
I’m sure the New York Times shivered with disgust when they wrote this but the plan sounds good to me. Let’s go!
In related news, Texas just offered President-elect Trump 1,400 acres of land to build deportation centers: