Donald Trump is promising to lead individual state National Guard units in the greatest ever roundup of illegally-present immigrants in all 50 states; they will be arrested and deported.
Those millions will have to be detained somewhere in order to be processed. Huge camps would be needed, camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. They would have to be moved around by bus or train, trains like those used in California during the 1930s deportations of Mexican looking people from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, freight trains.
Packed Los Angeles freight trains with people being deported impressed Germany to the point they refined the efforts and managed to move millions of people to their camps using the Los Angeles-California method of packed freight trains filled with the unwanted.
Steven Miller, Trump’s principal immigration advisor, has been circulating a “plan” to support Trump’s promise of the greatest, largest round-up of people in the country illegally and that his efforts will dwarf anything previously tried.
That 1950’s effort was called “Operation Wetback.”
The proposed Trump operation cannot legally use the military as the military cannot be used to enforce civilian law, so why is Steven Miller, Trump’s immigration spear-carrier, telling Trump supporters that the president will use federalized National Guardsmen to hunt down, arrest and deport their neighbors in their mutually shared state?
Related: America is the land of the free. Open the borders to those seeking a better life.
One suggestion is that President Trump will use the “Insurrection Act” as the basis of rounding up illegally-in-the-U.S. people and that it would be done, as Millers declares, by federalized National Guard troops that will be used in their own states, in other words, neighbors will seek and arrest neighbors and deport them. The defect, limited numbers of National Guardsmen, so what would Trump have to do? He would have to order them to other states. That is expensive. Can he pull it off?
Back to Republicans and what they will do on immigration if they win November’s election. They would need to win the Presidency, the House of Representatives and Senate to do anything. To win the Presidency, the House and the Senate appears today to be impossible. The only one of the three victories that look positive, winnable, for Republicans is the Senate.
Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats, exercised heavy weight enforcement against people illegally-in-the-U.S. But the Miller plans supersede previous efforts with stronger enforcement, tactics and deportations in numbers Republicans have never implemented. Under President Reagan, for example, three million illegally present were legalized by an amnesty. Republican George W. Bush tried to reform immigration and to open up paths to citizenship for millions.
Democrats like Senator Barack Obama betrayed their own constituencies and killed immigration reform by voting “no” on Bush’s proposal of immigration reform in the Senate. George W. Bush and the Republican House introduced and passed comprehensive immigration reform.
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The bill went to the Senate, the Democratic Senate led by Nevada Senator Harry Reid — who once introduced a bill to make English the official language of the U.S. and not allow Spanish ballots and other official documents for the millions who are more comfortable with Spanish than English. Reid had new Senate star Barack Obama amend the bill with a “poison pill” Republicans could not support so the Bush immigration reform bill died in the Senate. Two decades later we still do not have a decent and workable immigration reform despite two Democratic Presidents and two Democratic Houses and a Democratic Senate.
Republicans didn’t do any better, Trump entered the White House with a Republican House and Senate and the triad did nothing on immigration but talk into the wind.
As president, lame duck Democrat Barack Obama refused to do anything about immigration until the last months of his two terms except to split families up when they crossed the border and to set records of deportations —more than “Operation Wetback” to the point that immigration activists labeled Obama — “Deporter-in-Chief.”
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a U.S. Marine veteran, an author, and editorialist of newspapers and magazines, a campaign consultant and hosts the Contreras Report on YouTube