Trump says he will deport migrants en masse under the 225-year-old law

Former President Donald Trump is vowing to shift “enormous proportions” of law enforcement to immigration enforcement — and said he will use a federalist era to remove suspected gang members and drug dealers from the country.

Trump, who ran his 2016 campaign on a promise to build a border wall, touted his latest hardline proposals in an op-ed in the Des Moines Register. Trump has ramped up his events there in the final weeks before the Iowa Caucuses while he was ahead in the polls. Trump referred to record numbers of border crossings, which affected nearly 250,000 people in November, characterizing it as an “invasion.”

“We ended catch-and-release and removed well over a million illegal aliens during my first term. “I negotiated unprecedented agreements with Central American countries and brokered 'Remain in Mexico' to stem the flow of migrants to our border,” Trump wrote. He said President Biden “canceled” the border wall and “torn my asylum bans.”

(Biden recently angered some of his allies when his administration moved ahead with plans to build new sections of the border wall on the southern border). Trump also pointed to the 18th century Alien Enemies Act, passed as part of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, and said he would rely on the authority to kick out suspected gang members.

It was the same revised law that Franklin Delano Roosevelt used during World War II to create executive orders to deport and secure citizens of Germany, Japan, and Italy while they were at war with the U.S. (Roosevelt relied on different authorities for the forced internment of Japanese Americans, for which Congress apologized in 1988 and President Reagan signed a law providing compensation to the victims).

The 1918 Revised Statute applies “whenever war is declared between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is committed.” It was not clear that its use would be considered constitutional if the US was not at war with the migrants' home countries. “The millions of illegal aliens brought in under Biden will require a record number of removals. This is just common sense,” Trump wrote.

“I will also invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove known or suspected gang members, drug dealers or cartel members from the United States. And we will use Title 42 to finally end the child trafficking crisis,” Trump added.

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