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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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Comeback kid: Rachel Reeves’s revival plan

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Comeback kid: Rachel Reeves's revival plan

👉Listen to Politics At Sam And Anne’s on your podcast app👈

The chancellor is back out on the road to start the government’s re-launch week, ahead of the parliamentary recess.

In today’s episode, Sky News’ Sam Coates and Politico’s Anne McElvoy explain how comments on a proposed wealth tax by Rachel Reeves’s cabinet colleagues may have already put her in a tricky situation.

Elsewhere, Buckingham Palace has confirmed that Windsor Castle will host US President Donald Trump for a second unprecedented state visit in September.

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UK

Southend Airport remains closed after ‘fireball’ plane crash

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Southend Airport remains closed after 'fireball' plane crash

Southend Airport has been closed until further notice after a small plane crashed – as video footage emerged showing the aftermath of a huge fireball.

Images posted online showed large flames and a cloud of black smoke following the incident on Sunday afternoon.

Essex Police said it responded to “reports of a collision involving one 12-metre plane” shortly before 4pm.

“We are working with all emergency services at the scene now and that work will be ongoing for several hours,” the statement said.

“We would please ask the public to avoid this area where possible while this work continues.”

Southend Airport said it would be “closed until further notice” due to the “serious incident”.

“We ask that any passengers due to travel (on Monday) via London Southend Airport contact their airline for information and advice,” it added.

Fireball after plane crash at Southend Airport. Pic: Ben G
Image:
A huge fireball near the airport. Pic: Ben G

Zeusch Aviation, based at Lelystad Airport in the Netherlands, confirmed its SUZ1 flight had been “involved in an accident” at the airport and its thoughts were with “everyone who has been affected”.

It has been reported that the plane involved in the incident is a Beech B200 Super King Air.

According to flight-tracking service Flightradar, it took off at 3.48pm and was bound for Lelystad, a city in the Netherlands.

Pilots ‘waved’ to families watching planes

One man, who was at the airport with his wife and children, told Sky News the plane crashed within seconds of taking off.

John Johnson said the pilots “waved” at his family as they taxied the aircraft.

“We all waved [back] at them,” he continued. “They carried on taxiing to their take-off point and turned around.

“Then they throttled up the engines and passed by us. The aircraft took off and within a few seconds it had a steep bank angle to its left.”

The aircraft then “almost seemed to invert and unfortunately crashed,” he said. “There was a large fireball.”

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Smoke seen after small plane crashes

‘Airport was in lockdown’

Wren Stranix, 16, from Woodbridge in Suffolk, was in another aircraft waiting to take off for Newquay, Cornwall, with her family and boyfriend when the plane came down.

They watched from their aircraft as the emergency services arrived and were not able to leave their seats.

“The flight attendant didn’t know what was going on,” she told Sky News. “They said the plane had exploded and they didn’t know if it was safe or not. The airport was in lockdown.”

Smoke rising near Southend airport. Pic: UKNIP
Image:
Plumes of black smoke. Pic: UKNIP

They were eventually allowed back in the terminal to wait before all flights were cancelled.

Southend Airport said the incident involved “a general aviation aircraft”.

Read more from Sky News:
Liverpool honours Jota at first game since his death
Trump threatens to revoke comedian’s US citizenship

The plane pictured at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in September 2024. Pic: Pascal Weste
Image:
A photo of the plane at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in September 2024. Pic: Pascal Weste

After the incident, EasyJet – one of just a few airlines that uses the airport – said all of its remaining flights to and from Southend had been “diverted to alternative airports or are no longer able to operate”.

The airline said it has contacted customers who were due to travel on Sunday. Anyone due to fly on Monday should check online for up-to-date information, it added.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service said four crews, along with off-road vehicles, have attended the scene.

The East of England Ambulance Service said four ambulances, four hazardous area response team vehicles and an air ambulance had been sent to the incident.

Fire engines at the scene at Southend Airport
Image:
Fire engines at the airport

David Burton-Sampson, the MP for Southend West and Leigh, asked people to keep away from the area and “allow the emergency services to do their work” in a post on social media.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said she was “monitoring the situation closely and receiving regular updates”.

Essex Police have set up a dedicated public portal and phone line where people can contact them about the crash at https://esxpol.uk/LIbaz and on 0800 0961011.

Chief Superintendent Morgan Cronin said: “In these very early stages it is vital we gather the information we need, and continue supporting the people of Essex.”

He added: “We are working closely with all at the scene, as well as the Air Accident Investigation Branch, to establish what has happened today and why.”

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Environment

Honda’s super low-cost electric motorcycle revealed in new patent images

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Honda's super low-cost electric motorcycle revealed in new patent images

Honda’s patent filings offer a clear glimpse into the company’s plans for an ultra-affordable electric motorcycle, integrating a proven chassis with a simple electric powertrain. It’s a clear glimpse into how the world’s most prolific motorcycle maker plans to challenge the nascent electric motorcycle market.

The filings in Honda’s new patent show a bike built around the familiar platform of the Honda Shine 100, a best-selling commuter in India, reimagined in electric form for a cost-effective future of urban mobility.

According to Cycle World’s Ben Purvis, Honda’s patent sketches outline a design that repurposes the Shine’s sturdy frame and chassis mounting points to house an electric motor and compact battery setup. Positioned where the engine once sat, a mid-motor drives the rear wheel via a single-speed reduction gear and chain – mirroring the essentials of the original gasoline-powered commuter bike.

Instead of a traditional fuel tank, the design features two lithium-ion battery packs, angled forward on either side of the spine frame and fitting neatly into the existing geometry.

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What makes the bike revealed in this patent even more interesting isn’t just its clever packaging, but rather the platform. By leveraging the proven Shine chassis, Honda can significantly cut development costs, manufacturing complexity, and market price. That’s a big statement given that surviving in price-sensitive markets like India demands simplicity and reliability. And by piggybacking off a proven platform, Honda can dramatically reduce the time to market from the time the boardroom bigwigs give the project the final green light.

Honda’s patent images show an electric motorcycle built on the same platform as the Honda Shine 100

The design still seems to feature styling that would be fairly consistent with the Shine 100, even down to a gas cap-like circular protrusion likely on top of a faux-tank. Some electric motorcycles in the past have used this location to hide a charging port, keeping similar form and function to outdated fuel tanks and fill ports, though it’s not clear if that is Honda’s intention.

It’s not clear what power level Honda could be targeting, but the Shine bike from which Honda’s creation draws its design inspiration could provide some clues. The Honda Shine 100 features a 99cc engine that provides around 7.3 horsepower (around 5.5 kW) and has a top speed of 85 km/h (53 mph), solidly planting it in the commuter segment of motorcycles.

The electric motorcycle in Honda’s design would be unlikely to target much higher performance as it would drastically increase the required battery capacity, and thus similar speeds of around 80-85 km/h (50-53 mph) would seem likely.

There also appears to be no active cooling, which would also limit the amount of power that Honda would be likely to draw continuously. The patent describes a channel formed by the two battery packs, leading to the speed controller and creating ducted cooling that pulls heat out of the batteries and electronics without drawing extra power.

Honda hasn’t released a final design, but I ask AI to create one based on the patent images. I’d ride that!

This emerging design is just one piece of Honda’s broader electric two-wheeler strategy. Their entry-level EM1 e: and Activa e: scooters launched with mobile battery packs and budget-friendly pricing. Meanwhile, high-tech concepts continually push the envelope. But this Shine-based bike aims squarely at the heart of mainstream affordability – a move likely to resonate with millions of new electric riders in developing regions like India where traditionally-styled small-dsiplacement motorcycles reign supreme.

Honda hasn’t revealed a timeline or pricing yet, but Honda’s patents offer real hope to fans of the brand’s electric efforts. If scaled effectively, this could be the first truly mass-market electric motorcycle from a major OEM, with a sticker price likely far below the $5,000 mark usually seen as a floor for commuter electric motorcycles from major manufacturers. That would also dramatically undercut models from brands like Zero or Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire, even as those brands rush to bring their own lower-cost models to market.

Electrek’s Take

Honda’s patent reveals a clever, no-frills EV designed to democratize electric two-wheeling, especially in developing markets that are even more price-sensitive than Western electric motorcycle customers.

Using a trusted frame, simple electric drive, and passive cooling, I’d say it definitely prioritizes cost over complexity, which is exactly what urban commuters need. If Honda can bring this to market, it would not just add another electric bike to the mix… it could create a new baseline for affordability in affordable electric mobility. Now we’re just waiting for the rubber to hit the road!

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