Summary
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding details on plans to implement President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation program.
The lawsuit follows ICE’s failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August.
The ACLU seeks information on ICE’s chartered flights, transportation contracts, and facilities potentially used for deportations.
Trump has vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and plans to declare a national emergency to activate military resources.
Advocates warn the program could devastate immigrant communities. Investigations are ongoing.
They have no plan. We know this because it’s already mathematically impossible to do what they’re wanting to do. There literally aren’t enough places to detain all the immigrants they want to deport, nor are there enough ICE employees to even process them. You can’t just snatch people up and stuff 'em on an airplane and be done with it, there’s a whole process involved that our system does not have the capacity to even begin to support.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re 100% going to do some deportations, and they’ll make sure that it’s national news when they do it. They’ll make sure that FOX tells you about their criminal histories, and they’ll make sure CNN tells you about their children locked in cages hundreds of miles away from their parents.
It’s not about actually deporting immigrants. It’s about making the immigrants that are already here feel unsafe. It’s about making them feel insecure, worrying about whether they’ll be eating dinner tomorrow at home, or behind bars. It’s about making everybody live in fear; citizens are to fear their criminal neighbors, and immigrants are to fear the neighbors that would rat them out to ICE. Everything Trump and his team do are about making people turn against each other. And it works.
There are ways to move millions of people. It’s been done before. If they have the resources to do it (its the US military, they definitely do), there’s nothing really stopping them. He’s the most powerful man in the world. Legal process is kind of out the door if he says so. He said he was going to enact emergency powers. Doesn’t that essentially mean a suspension of the US constitution? If so, there’s nothing preventing him from doing that.
Deportations have to be negotiated with the receiving nation, regardless of whether we have a declared emergency or not. You can’t just send somebody back without approval (otherwise you’re facilitating an invasion), so each individual case has to be processed by both the US’s immigration departments as well as whichever country you’re trying to deport that person to. It doesn’t happen often, but there are situations where a receiving country could outright refuse a deportee, or may be otherwise unable to receive them (perhaps the person isn’t a recognized citizen of that country, either).
Deportation isn’t as swift of a process as a lot of people think. Many deportees spend weeks or months in detainment before they’re ever released. The system would be immediately backlogged if they were to move at rates Trump is suggesting.
There’s also the issue of sending civilians into active warzones. Many immigrants are refugees, escaping from countries that are at war. Take Haiti for instance: They’re in the process of being taken over by gangs, and their government is in shambles trying to combat them. Their president was assassinated a few years ago, and kidnappings of civilians are on the rise. Civilians are not safe in Haiti right now, and sending people into an active conflict like that could be seen as a crime against humanity.
There will be deportations. Hundreds, maybe thousands. But definitely not millions.
How can anybody who lived through this moron’s first administration think he has a plan for anything.
I can’t believe we need to go through this shit again…