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Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.

In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nations immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.

Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Bidens time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.

Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History, as he put it last month on social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. Thats because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented, David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. What hes describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.

How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trumps top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the presidents command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge deportation force or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trumps four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nations interior as Barack Obamas administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Read: The GOPs true priority

Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.

This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home, Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.

Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume thats what they will try to do in a second term, said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job. (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)

Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Millers most extreme immigration ideas during Trumps term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trumps four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy, Taylor said.

Miller outlined the Trump teams plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million foreign-national invaders who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids. Then, he said, it would build large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas, to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets, Miller told Kirk.

In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to building the Panama Canal. He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to deputize local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. You go to the red-state governors and you say, Give us your National Guard, he said. We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.

The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an unfriendly state whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

Read: The specter of famiy separation

Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. If you want to deport a million a yearand Im a Navy officeryou are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment, Houser told me.

Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. Its not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented, said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.

All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale hes discussing.

Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to break down doors in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.

You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings, Houser said. Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving. He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.

Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine, told me, Theres no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time. The example Trump most often cites as a model is Operation Wetback, the mass-deportation programnamed for a slur against Mexican Americanslaunched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communities in cities such as Los Angeles. Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.

The Republican response to Texass standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues. The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that hell build more of the barriers nonetheless. We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence, Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border, where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.

But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.

The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.

The governors provided those forces to Trump under whats known as hybrid status for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their states governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isnt particularly unusual; what made that deployment unprecedented, in Joseph Nunns phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that dont want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because its not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois constitutional rights. Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal, Nunn said. One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving states consent.

But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.

There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act, Nunn told me. There are quite literally no safeguards.

Read: Americas immigration reckoning has arrived

The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.

In fact, as Ive written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. Hes also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched n our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trumps request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, its easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force, Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.

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Wes Streeting denies Labour has made ‘mistakes’ with ‘unpopular’ policies despite poor local election results

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Wes Streeting denies Labour has made 'mistakes' with 'unpopular' policies despite poor local election results

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has defended “unpopular” policies such as the cut to the winter fuel allowance despite Labour’s poor performance at the local elections.

Mr Streeting denied the government had made any mistakes when asked whether the policy was partly to blame for the party losing 189 council seats less than a year since the General Election.

Since coming into government last July, Labour has enacted a number of policies that were not in its manifesto.

These include means-testing winter fuel payments for pensioners, increasing employers’ national insurance contributions and slashing £5bn from the welfare bill.

Asked what mistakes his government had made so far that had led to its drubbing at the ballot box, Mr Streeting told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “Well, we will make plenty of mistakes.”

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Pressed again on whether he believed “mistakes” had been made, the health secretary replied: “No. When we made those choices, we knew they would be unpopular. And we knew that they would be opposed.

“The reason we made those choices is because we genuinely believe they’re the right choices to get the country out of the massive hole it was left in. And right across the board. Whether it’s the NHS, whether it’s schools, whether it’s prisons, whether it’s our defence and security, whether it’s crime and policing, there were enormous challenges facing this country when we came in.

“And we’ve had to make big and sometimes unpopular decisions so that we can face those challenges and deal with them. People might thank us if we just kind of go for the easy but we want to make the right choices.”

Some Labour MPs have urged the government to change direction, with one telling Sky News the cut to winter fuel was a “catastrophic error” that must be “remedied” if the party is to see any improvement in public opinion.

Others have warned that in courting Reform voters, the party risks fracturing its coalition of voters on the left who may be tempted by the Liberal Democrats and Green Party.

However, in the aftermath of the local elections, Sir Keir Starmer suggested the poor results meant he needed to go “further and faster” in delivering his existing agenda.

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Inside Reform’s election success

The real victor to emerge from Thursday’s local elections was Reform UK, which won control of 10 councils and picked up 677 council seats largely at the expense of the Conservatives in the south.

However, Reform also won the Runcorn by-election from Labour by just six votes, as well as control of Doncaster Council from Labour – the only local authority it had control of in this set of elections – in a significant win for Nigel Farage and his party.

The Reform UK leader declared that two-party politics was now “finished” and that his party was now the official “opposition” to Labour.

Asked whether the results meant that Labour would now treat Reform as “your most serious opposition”, Mr Streeting said: ” I certainly do treat them as a serious opposition force.”

“As I say, I don’t know whether it will be Reform or the Conservatives that emerge as the main threat,” he added.

“I don’t have a horse in that race, but like alien versus predator, I don’t really want either one to win.”

Read more:
Reform’s mission to ‘remoralise’ young people
Reform has put the two traditional parties on notice

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Reform UK are ‘fighting force’

Tory Party chairman Nigel Huddleston said Reform UK was not just a protest party and that Mr Farage was “a force in British politics”.

He told Trevor Phillips: “But the one thing about Nigel Farage is, and we’re seeing this again and again and again, he is a populist.

“He is increasingly saying everything that anybody wants to hear. He’s trying to be all things to all men.”

“We are establishing ourselves as a credible alternative government based on sound conservative principles and values and our values and our principles, and therefore our policies, will define the future of our party,” he added.

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It’s back: Hyundai IONIQ 5 qualifies for $7,500 tax credit – again!

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It's back: Hyundai IONIQ 5 qualifies for ,500 tax credit – again!

The Hyundai IONIQ 5 got a raft of upgrades and sporty, rally-focused XRT trim level for 2025 – but the biggest upgrade for the Made in America Hyundai might be this: the 5 has regained eligibility for the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit!

Despite being assembled at Hyundai’s Georgia meta plant for the last four month, the 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 was nowhere to be found on the EPA’s list of rebate-eligible vehicles. But that was then – with a fresh updated to the list coming online May 1st, Hyundai’s new-age electric hot hatch is back in the rebate game.

It’s worth noting that lease customers had been able to access the incentive under some circumstances, but this latest update to the EPA list makes it possible for cash and payment buyers to take advantage of the full Federal incentive, too – as long as they earn less than $300,000 as a married couple filing jointly, less than $225,000 as a head of household, or less than $150,000 as an individual.

With the $7,500 federal tax credit in the equation, you can get a new 2025 IONIQ 5 for somewhere in between $36,575 and $49,475, well under the $80,000 Federal MSRP cap.

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Victory lap

As if to celebrate, Hyundai announced that it was taking on the celebrate One Lap of America road rayy and race event in a factory collaboration with the track-focused enthusiasts at Grassroots Motorsports this week with One Lap veterans Andy Hollis and Tom Suddard campaigning a stock, 601 hp 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 N in the Alternative Fuels class.

“After winning our class in a gutted, caged race car last year, we wanted to compete in the best-of-all worlds this year: A vehicle that’s incredibly fast, incredibly comfortable on a road trip, and incredibly capable on a racetrack,” explains Suddard. “Electrification means it’s finally possible to have huge power without huge compromises in a street car, and the IONIQ 5 N promises to pair that huge power with the durability and capability to survive a week of racing.”

One Lap is widely regarded as one of the toughest street-legal motorsports events in the world, pitting amateur and professional drivers alike compete in stock and heavily modified vehicles of every description, battling it out in a series of scored challenges, including timed events at road courses, drag strips, skid pads, and autocross courses.

In between tracks, competitors safely travel thousands of miles around the country, proving the mettle and durability of the vehicles and the teams that drive them. This year, 86 teams from all over the country will compete in 17 scored events over the course of eight days at tracks like Virginia International Raceway and NCM Motorsports Park.

The Tire Rack One Lap of America is currently underway – you can track the Hyundai’s progress here, then let us know what you think of this new tax development in the comments.

SOURCES | IMAGES: Hyundai, One Lap of America; FuelEconomy.gov.


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It is ‘feasible’ Nigel Farage could be the next prime minister, says Kemi Badenoch

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It is 'feasible' Nigel Farage could be the next prime minister, says Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch has admitted it is “feasible” that Nigel Farage could become the next prime minister.

The Tory leader told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme Mr Farage’s party was “expressing the feeling of frustration that a lot of people around the country are feeling” – but added it was her job to “come up with answers and solutions”.

Asked if it was feasible that Mr Farage could be the next prime minister, she cited how Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had won re-election this weekend.

“As I said, anything is feasible,” she said. “Anthony Albanese: people were writing him off. He has just won a landslide, but my job is to make sure that he [Farage] does not become prime minister because he does not have the answers to the problems the country is facing.”

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Could Nigel Farage be prime minister?

Asked what Mr Farage was doing right, Ms Badenoch said: “He is expressing the feeling of frustration that a lot of people around the country are feeling.

“But he also doesn’t have a record in government like the two main parties do. Now he’s going to be running some councils. We’ll see how that goes.”

Mr Farage was the undoubted winner of Thursday’s local elections, in which 23 councils were up for grabs.

His party picked up 677 council seats and took control of 10 councils.

By contrast, the Conservatives lost 677 council seats as well as control of 18 councils in what was their worst local elections performance on record.

Mr Farage said the outcome spelt the end of two-party politics and that his party was now the official “opposition” to Labour – with the Tories having been rendered a “waste of space”.

Read more:
Reform has put the two traditional parties on notice

‘I get it’: Starmer responds after losing Runcorn by-election

Ms Badenoch said she believed the vote for Mr Farage on Thursday was partly down to “protest” but added: “That doesn’t mean we sit back. We are going to come out fighting.

“We are going to come out with the policies that people want to see, but what we are not going to do is rush out and tell the public things that are not true just so we can win votes.

“This is not about winning elections; this is about fixing our country. Yes, of course, you need to win elections to do that, but you also need a credible plan.”

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‘Farage is a force in British politics’

Conservative co-chairman Nigel Huddleston sought to play down the threat from Reform UK, telling Sky News: “When they’re in a position of delivering things, that’s when the shine comes off.”

He told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “The one thing about Nigel Farage is, and we’re seeing this again and again and again, he is a populist.

“He is increasingly saying everything that anybody wants to hear. He’s trying to be all things to all men.”

“We are establishing ourselves as a credible alternative government based on sound conservative principles and values and our values and our principles, and therefore our policies, will define the future of our party,” he added.

Asked whether the results meant that Labour would now treat Reform as “your most serious opposition”, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Trevor Phillips: ” I certainly do treat them as a serious opposition force.”

“As I say, I don’t know whether it will be Reform or the Conservatives that emerge as the main threat,” he added.

“I don’t have a horse in that race, but like alien versus predator, I don’t really want either one to win.”

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