If he wins a second term, former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to wage war on immigration, implementing a vast array of policies dreamed up with Stephen Miller, the adviser behind his most controversial first-term immigration policies.
A New York Times story published on Saturday provided details: Trump would round up millions of undocumented people and put them in detention camps while they await deportation, using reassigned federal law enforcement and National Guard members to help with the sweeps.
Other reported proposals would deny automatic citizenship to babies born to undocumented people and deny visas to people with ideological views Trump does not like.
President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign called it “the horrifying reality that awaits the American people” if Trump is “allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again.”
“These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election,” read a statement from the campaign.
It continued: “Trump talks openly about his plans at rallies, and voters should take him at his word. He’s making the wrong bet. The American people chose unity over division and hope over fear in 2020 when they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and sent Donald Trump packing, and they’ll do it again next year.”
Miller told The New York Times that the proposals would rely on existing statutes, allowing Trump to act without needing help from Congress to overhaul immigration laws — which would be a tough task.
“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
Trump would reportedly seek to reinstate his first-term ban on people from Muslim-majority nations entering the country and refuse asylum to people at the southern U.S. border. According to the Times, he would use the same authority that allowed him to bar asylum-seekers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic but say migrants carried other diseases like tuberculosis.
People with temporary protected status — a legal designation for people from certain countries where there was a natural disaster or armed conflict — would also reportedly lose it.
The proposals would undoubtedly spark instant legal challenges nationwide, and some could be ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, where Trump placed three of the nine justices.