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.
We don’t have a lot of reason to think that the military wouldn’t comply. We have a handful of examples of troops refusing orders from very close in the command hierarchy to commit overt inarguable war crimes. We have more examples to the contrary.
If they get the order from someone just up the chain to torch a subdivision and napalm the children, it’s a coin toss. If it’s the presidents policy, and they’re just relocating people? Bit risky not to comply.
Is this uncharitable to the troops that a lot of people have high ideals will behave morally as regards legal and illegal orders? Most definitely. But also, they napalm civilian targets, torch villages and have literally rounded up Americans and our them in camps before, without due process. It’s not even a novel situation.
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”.
Soldiers are humans, and the average human is an evil sack of shit, so yeah there will always be new atrocities. The immigrant thing doesn’t really come down to the individual soldier though, it comes down to military leadership acting on or ignoring an order from Trump… and that outlook doesn’t leave me much hope, cuz military leadership doesn’t give a fuck about doing the right thing, just the legal thing.
I mean, the human will to evil and the military leadership being willing to listen to political evil are in alignment in this case. So if the military is ordered to do some camps, they’re gonna do some camps.
You just always here a lot of talk about how much the military is focused on not doing atrocities, and it’s tossed out as a knowing trump card whenever talk of the military doing stuff on US soil comes up.
“The army would never torch a subdivision in Milwaukee, the houses look like their houses, the people look like them, and they get too much training telling them not to evil in specific ways in specific contexts”. It misses that the same people who explained the rules are the ones who’ll be telling them to do the evil, and that our soldiers aren’t better or worse than any other, morally. And soldiers regularly do evil in places that look like their homes, to people who look like their families.
The integrity of the military is just not a barrier to them being used to do bad things ™ domestically.
Yeah for sure - lawful orders only matter if the law is moral, and historically… yeah…
This is one of the examples where I don’t think lawful order training will make a huge difference.
That said, illegal immigrants - even if they’re just as bad a Fox paints them (WHICH IS BULLSHIT), they’re still not a tactical threat, so if there’s any hope from a military perspective of leadership not being on board, it’ll be from a priority standpoint. …which ofc hinges on military leadership not all being replaced with Trump loyalists, so even that’s a short term hope.
Even with all that though, domestically I’m not really worried about the military; it’s the cops I’m worried about. Trump already has a massive, religiously loyal, heavily armed goon squad in every single city in the US. And secondary to them are all the civilian Trumpanzees who’ll respond without question to his stochastic domestic terrorism. This country’s fucked well ahead of military involvement.
Definitely agree 100%.
The cop thing is weird. In all the cases where (extremist) people talk about wanting to use the military that would normally be handled by the police, like crowd control, detaining large numbers of people, or systematic checkpoints and door to do searches, I’d actually prefer the military to the cops. Not because they’ll push back or violate civil liberties any less, but because military training is consistent and actually happens, so when someone shoves them at a checkpoint the training they regress to will be at least of a higher baseline quality than the average cop.
It’s pretty wild to watch military footage through the lens of “what if those were cops, and what if the people they were engaging were civilians…?” and realizing that the military shows a relative shit-ton of restraint. Soo many times where the military folks see like a hand reach back into a pocket they can’t see - and they’ll react, by tensing up and getting a hand on their weapon or something… and that’s it… and out comes a wallet from the other dude, military folks understand there’s no threat, and the situation never escalates.
Cops? Dude would have 4 clips unloaded into him by 3 people.
I know cops have their own version of rules of engagement - probable cause and such - but they kinda just don’t give a fuck.
Don’t get me wrong, the military is fucked up in a lot of ways - I was there, it’s fucking bad - but it’s not that kind of bad.
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.
There’s still the UCMJ and rules of engagement. No idea what it takes to change those.
Idk, I’m grasping at straws to find a flicker of hope in this shitstorm.
USMJ was created by Congress. They can change that at will via legislation.