Throughout his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to reverse former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies and secure the southern border. Trump has followed through on some of his promises yet has simultaneously ignored foundational American principles in the process. In his second inaugural address, given last January, Trump declared a “national emergency at our southern border,” vowing to transport “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” However, in this same address, Trump promised not only to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, facilitating the unconstitutional deportation of thousands, but also to send troops to the southern border, foreshadowing a darker reality where ICE, Border Patrol and the National Guard alike have carried out violent and discriminatory practices in major American cities.
The Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
During his second inaugural address, Trump explained his plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a part of the administration’s broader immigration agenda. Signed into law by President John Adams, the act states that when the U.S.’s security is threatened, dangerous, unnaturalized inhabitants of the United States can be “apprehended” and “removed” by the U.S. government. The act has only been invoked three times: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. The most scrutinized invocation came during World War II, which resulted in the dark period of Japanese internment, during which approximately 120,000 American residents of Japanese descent were forced into concentration camps.
While the policy of Japanese internment constituted an extreme reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the conflict between the U.S. and Imperial Japan, the current issue of immigration does not pose a comparably serious threat. Trump did call the immigration crisis a “national emergency” in his second inaugural address, but migration itself does not place the nation in imminent danger the way a foreign military attack does. And while the act does allow for certain groups to be apprehended in cases of “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” the fact that migrants don’t fit the criterion of a “foreign nation or government” illegitimizes this justification.
Trump already invoked this act this past March as a part of his plan to deport over 100 Venezuelan gang members. In response, judges from Texas, New York, and Colorado have ruled on the unconstitutionality of Trump’s use of the law in this context, though the Supreme Court validated Trump’s invocation of the act as long as the alleged gang members were awarded the right to a fair trial. However, it later ruled that the White House should temporarily refrain from this activity following legal reports that immigrants had been imprisoned without due process, which is promised under the Fifth Amendment. So not only does Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 appear unnecessary due to the lack of a serious threat being posed against the United States, but it has also encouraged the White House to undertake unconstitutional and morally questionable homeland security measures.
Sending Troops to the Southern Border
In the same speech, President Trump also promised to “send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.” Unlike Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, there is nothing inherently radical about this proposition. The National Guard has been deployed to address crises at the southern border multiple times throughout American history. However, Trump did not just direct troops to the southern border. He sent them to some of the most densely populated cities in the country.
Many of the issues with the current administration’s immigration enforcement policy can be summed up in an interview with senior Border Patrol official Greg Bovino featured on The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast. After ICE failed to deport the 3,000 migrants a day that Trump wanted, Bovino was chosen to oversee border patrol activities due to his reputation for aggressiveness and relentlessness as the chief of El Centro, California’s Border Patrol sector.
Before working with President Trump and the National Guard, he led Border Patrol operations in California’s Central Valley. Here, he disagreed with the approach of knocking on his targets’ doors, instead calling for Border Patrol and ICE agents to station themselves in public places like Home Depots and question anyone suspected of being a criminal.
Some individuals, however, were bound to be racially profiled. Because Bovino and his men chose to camp in public spaces rather than pursue targeted arrests, Latinos and Spanish speakers were more likely to be stopped and questioned. When asked about this in the interview, he replied that speaking Spanish alone was not grounds for arrest, claiming that he had apprehended immigrants from Europe as well as Latin America during these raids. To call this a deflection would be an understatement, as Bovino refused to answer if ICE and Border Patrol were arresting people, including American citizens, on the basis of ethnicity.
As a leader of large-scale ICE raids in Chicago and Los Angeles, Bovino directed ICE, Border Patrol, and the National Guard alike to, in his words, arrest people based on “obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look.” The military employing Bovino’s tactics in these major metropolitan areas as a way to target particular groups of people and stifle dissent evokes the plots of dystopian novels such as “1984” and “Fahrenheit 451.” The fact that this reflects this country’s present state of affairs feels surreal. The presence of armed forces in these cities does not promote security; it instills fear not only in Latinos but in the American population as a whole. No American should feel safe as long as the threat of one’s apartment building being broken into or of being tear-gassed in the streets remains.
