Trump backs ‘emergency’ plan to use military for mass deportations

President-elect Donald Trump Monday backed an “emergency” plan to use the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, which he has said could target more than 10 million people.

“True!!!” Trump posted on his social media site in response to an ally’s claim that the incoming president would use unspecified emergency powers to round up and boot immigrants from the U.S.

“(Trump is) prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets (for) a mass deportation program,” read the post from Tom Fitton, a right-wing legal activist.

Trump oddly reposted Fitton’s Nov. 8 post at 4:03 am Monday without elaborating.

It’s not known what Trump or Fitton meant by a national emergency or how that would give him the right to use the military to carry out mass deportations.

The military is generally barred from taking part in domestic law enforcement like rounding up people suspected of being undocumented immigrants inside the U.S.

Border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are focused primarily on seeking to prevent immigrants from crossing the country’s borders.

Those agencies would be woefully understaffed and underfunded to mount a major nationwide effort to identify, find, detain and deport many millions of people living in the country.

Trump made mass deportation a major plank of his successful presidential campaign and has claimed more than 15 million undocumented immigrants will need to be booted back to their homelands.

Those numbers could include asylum seekers, recipients of Temporary Protective Status and the so-called Dreamers or beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program meant to provide a path to citizenship for people brought to the U.S. when they were minors.

Trump has lashed out at immigrants, many of whom have the legal right to be in the U.S., for what he calls the takeover of small cities in the heartland. The spots includes Springfield, Ohio, where racist conspiracy theorists accuse Haitians of eating neighbors’ pets, and Aurora, Colorado, which Trump says has been “taken over” by Venezuelan gangs.

The looming anti-immigrant push has also driven Trump’s picks for his incoming cabinet.

Hardliner Stephen Miller was one of the first selections as deputy White House chief of staff for policy. He he has regularly decried illegal immigration as the biggest problems facing the nation and was an architect of the border family separation policies in the first Trump administration.

Tom Homan, a tough-talking former ICE head, has been named so-called border czar.

Homan has repeatedly said he has the know-how to deport anyone living in the country without legal documentation and has brushed off concerns about separating families, including those of mixed immigration status.

Trump also has said he hopes to eliminate birthright U.S. citizenship, a practice that courts have ruled is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Critics say the deportation push is dangerous and impractical, and could have devastating effects on the American economy.

Industries like agriculture, meat processing and hospitality are heavily dependent on labor from undocumented immigrants. Removing immigrants would raise costs for companies and prices for consumers.

Undocumented immigrants also pay billions of dollars a year in taxes and pump billions more into the U.S. economy by consumer spending.