American Troops as Migrants: Trump Launching a War on America Itself

 Depending on how closely President Donald Trump follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, he may use the US military to carry out mass deportations of migrants. With the military already deeply intertwined with law enforcement, such a shift could transform the very nature of the immigration system, making it a domestic war on a large portion of the people living in the United States.

This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. US President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers.

Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: the troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years — more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.

An uncertain future

Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.

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Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about four to five million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.

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It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border — a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.

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Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.

A merging of powers

In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the US to consolidate its military, intelligence and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.

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CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.

Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.

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Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: the flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a

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Soldiers, sailors and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way. Read more