Trump confirms he will declare national emergency and use military for mass deportation

TOI Correspondent from Washington: US President-elect and MAGA supremo Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that his administration will declare a national emergency and use military assets in a mass deportation program to "reverse the Biden invasion."

Trump responded with a single-word response ("True!") to a week-old post from a rightwing commentator who said there are reports to this effect, even as the President-elect's putative border czar Tom Homan warned Democratic-governed states that have said they will not cooperate with the deportation program to "get the hell out of our way."

"All this crap ends on January 20...Federal law trumps state law every single time," Homan said in a podcast in a warning to Democrat governors of California, Illinois, and Massachusetts who have suggested they will resist the incoming administration's mass deportation plans.

Promising "shock and awe" from day one, Homan said the Trump administration will prioritize public safety and national security to first deport 425,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records. Asserting that there were millions of deserving immigrants and asylum seekers who had been pushed to the back of the line by the invasion of illegals, he said immigrants will get due process in court of law, and if they lose, they will have to return to their country. In a separate appearance on Fox Business, Homan said “legal immigrants are perfectly safe.”

Describing his personal experience on the border, Homan said he resented the fact that border patrol agents who are mandated to stop the illegal invasion has been turned into "travel agents' tasked with processing illegal immigrants and putting them on onward flights into the US, giving them free airline tickets, free hotel stay, and free health care at tax payer expense while millions of Americans were suffering.

Illegal immigration, along with inflation and price rise, were among the key factors that powered Trump's return to the White House for a second term, and the President-elect appears on track to make good his mass deportation pledge amid doubts about the feasibility of sending back upwards of 10 million illegals, many of whom are seasonal agricultural workers.

Liberal activists have warned that turfing them out result in a hike in grocery prices. More extreme scenarios paint a picture of economic collapse even as some think tanks have estimated it would cost upward of $ 300 billion to nearly $ 1 trillion to get all the illegal immigrants out of the country -- which is considered impossible.

"Mass deportations would cause significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector," the American Immigration Council has warned, estimating that nearly 14 percent of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented. "Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure. As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs," it said.

In an October 2024 report, the AIC estimated that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It would also result in significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, and contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.

These numbers, the AIC said, do not even come close to capturing the human cost of mass deportation: About 5.1 million US citizen children live with an undocumented family member. "Separating family members would lead to tremendous emotional stress and could also cause economic hardship for many of these mixed-status families who might lose their breadwinners, jeopardizing their economic and social well-being," it cautioned.