Setting the Tone For Police State? Trump weighs mobilizing Nat. Guard for immigration roundups
On the surface this is good however it opens up a can of worms for down the road. Who will they target next? Trump is a NWO Zionist puppet.
The Trump
administration is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000
National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including
millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft
memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The
11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of
immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far
east as New Orleans, Louisiana.
Four states
that border on Mexico are included in the proposal - California,
Arizona, New Mexico and Texas - but it also encompasses seven states
contiguous to those four - Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma,
Arkansas and Louisiana.
Governors in the 11
states would have a choice whether to have their guard troops
participate, according to the memo, written by U.S. Homeland Security
Secretary John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general.
While
National Guard personnel have been used to assist with
immigration-related missions on the U.S.-Mexico border before, they have
never been used as broadly or as far north.
The
memo is addressed to the then-acting heads of U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It would
serve as guidance to implement the wide-ranging executive order on
immigration and border security that President Donald Trump signed Jan.
25. Such memos are routinely issued to supplement executive orders.
Also
dated Jan. 25, the draft memo says participating troops would be
authorized "to perform the functions of an immigration officer in
relation to the investigation, apprehension and detention of aliens in
the United States." It describes how the troops would be activated under
a revived state-federal partnership program, and states that personnel
would be authorized to conduct searches and identify and arrest any
unauthorized immigrants.
Requests to the White
House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment and a status
report on the proposal were not answered.
The
draft document has circulated among DHS staff over the last two weeks.
As recently as Friday, staffers in several different offices reported
discussions were underway.
If implemented, the
impact could be significant. Nearly one-half of the 11.1 million people
residing in the U.S. without authorization live in the 11 states,
according to Pew Research Center estimates based on 2014 Census data.
Use
of National Guard troops would greatly increase the number of
immigrants targeted in one of Trump's executive orders last month, which
expanded the definition of who could be considered a criminal and
therefore a potential target for deportation. That order also allows
immigration agents to prioritize removing anyone who has "committed acts
that constitute a chargeable criminal offense."
Under
current rules, even if the proposal is implemented, there would not be
immediate mass deportations. Those with existing deportation orders
could be sent back to their countries of origin without additional court
proceedings. But deportation orders generally would be needed for most
other unauthorized immigrants.
The troops would not be nationalized, remaining under state control.
Spokespeople
for the governors of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Colorado,
Oklahoma, Oregon and New Mexico said they were unaware of the proposal,
and either declined to comment or said it was premature to discuss
whether they would participate. The other three states did not
immediately respond to the AP.
The proposal
would extend the federal-local partnership program that President Barack
Obama's administration began scaling back in 2012 to address complaints
that it promoted racial profiling.
The 287(g)
program, which Trump included in his immigration executive order, gives
local police, sheriff's deputies and state troopers the authority to
assist in the detection of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally as a
regular part of their law enforcement duties on the streets and in
jails.
The draft memo also mentions other
items included in Trump's executive order, including the hiring of an
additional 5,000 border agents, which needs financing from Congress, and
his campaign promise to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The signed order contained no mention of the possible use of state National Guard troops.
According
to the draft memo, the militarization effort would be proactive,
specifically empowering Guard troops to solely carry out immigration
enforcement, not as an add-on the way local law enforcement is used in
the program.
Allowing Guard troops to operate inside non-border states also would go far beyond past deployments.
In
addition to responding to natural or man-made disasters or for military
protection of the population or critical infrastructure, state Guard
forces have been used to assist with immigration-related tasks on the
U.S.-Mexico border, including the construction of fences.
In
the mid-2000s, President George W. Bush twice deployed Guard troops on
the border to focus on non-law enforcement duties to help augment the
Border Patrol as it bolstered its ranks. And in 2010, then-Arizona Gov.
Jan Brewer announced a border security plan that included Guard
reconnaissance, aerial patrolling and military exercises.
In
July 2014, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry ordered 1,000 National Guard
troops to the border when the surge of migrant children fleeing violence
in Central America overwhelmed U.S. officials responsible for their
care. The Guard troops' stated role on the border at the time was to
provide extra sets of eyes but not make arrests.
Bush
initiated the federal 287(g) program - named for a section of a 1996
immigration law - to allow specially trained local law enforcement
officials to participate in immigration enforcement on the streets and
check whether people held in local jails were in the country illegally.
ICE trained and certified roughly 1,600 officers to carry out those
checks from 2006 to 2015.
The memo describes the program as a "highly successful force multiplier" that identified more than 402,000 "removable aliens."
But
federal watchdogs were critical of how DHS ran the program, saying it
was poorly supervised and provided insufficient training to officers,
including on civil rights law. Obama phased out all the arrest power
agreements in 2013 to instead focus on deporting recent border crossers
and immigrants in the country illegally who posed a safety or national
security threat.
Trump's immigration strategy
emerges as detentions at the nation's southern border are down
significantly from levels seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Last
year, the arrest tally was the fifth-lowest since 1972. Deportations of
people living in the U.S. illegally also increased under the Obama
administration, though Republicans criticized Obama for setting
prosecution guidelines that spared some groups from the threat of
deportation, including those brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Last
week, ICE officers arrested more than 680 people around the country in
what Kelly said were routine, targeted operations; advocates called the
actions stepped-up enforcement under Trump.
