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      The Insurrection Act Has to Go

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      There is a land mine embedded in the United States Code, one that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, could use to destroy our republic. But it’s not too late for Congress to defuse the mine now and protect America.I’m talking about the Insurrection Act, a federal law that permits the president to deploy military troops in American communities to effectively act as a domestic police force under his direct command. In theory, there is a need for a well-drafted law that permits the use of federal troops in extreme circumstances to maintain order and protect the rule of law. The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.These flaws are especially relevant because Trump and his allies are keenly aware of the act’s provisions and have long expressed interest in its use. Trump has publicly regretted not using more military force to suppress riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, there were suggestions that he utilize the act as part of his plot to steal the 2020 election, and now there are reports that Trump might invoke the act on the first day of his next term, to suppress demonstrations, to control the border or both.Moreover, these reports have to be read in the context of Trump’s latest public pronouncements. He has declared many of his domestic political opponents to be “vermin.” His campaign has promised that his critics’ “sad, miserable existence” will be “crushed.” And he has specifically told his followers, “I am your vengeance.”Some version of the Insurrection Act is probably necessary. After all, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War to Trump’s own insurrection on Jan. 6, we have seen direct, violent challenges to federal authority. But any such authorization should be carefully circumscribed and subject to oversight. The authority granted by the act, however, is remarkably broad, and oversight is virtually nonexistent.The Insurrection Act contains a number of provisions, and not all are equally bad. For example, the first provision, 10 U.S.C. Section 251, provides that the president may deploy troops “upon the request of [a state’s] legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened” in the event of an insurrection. There is no unilateral presidential authority under this provision; the president’s power is activated only by a state request.But the act gets worse, much worse. The next section takes the gloves off, giving the president the ability to call out the National Guard or the regular army “whenever the president considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Note the key language: “whenever the president considers.” That means deployment is up to him and to him alone.The section after that does much same thing, again granting the president the power to “take such measures he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.” This broad grant of power makes the Insurrection Act far more immediately dangerous than many other threatened Trump actions, such as prosecuting political opponents and transforming the federal work force. Judicial review can blunt many of Trump’s worst initiatives, but there’s no such obvious check on the use of his power under the act.You might wonder why the Insurrection Act hasn’t presented much of a problem before now. It’s been used rarely, and when it has been used, it’s been used for legitimate purposes. For example, it was used repeatedly to suppress racist violence in the South during the Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement. Most recently, George H.W. Bush invoked it in 1992 — at the request of the governor of California — to assist in quelling the extreme violence of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.That historical restraint has been dependent on a factor that is utterly absent from Trump: a basic commitment to the Constitution and democracy. Previous presidents, for all their many flaws, still largely upheld and respected the rule of law. Even in their most corrupt moments, there were lines they wouldn’t cross. Trump not only has no such lines but also has made his vengeful intentions abundantly clear.There is still time, however, to take this terrible tool out of Trump’s potential hands. The Insurrection Act has not always been so broad. In its earliest versions, the president’s power was much more carefully constrained. But Congress expanded the president’s power after the Civil War, in part to deal with racist insurgencies in the defeated Confederacy.It’s time to rein in the excesses of the act. In 2022, Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn from the Brennan Center for Justice submitted a comprehensive reform proposal to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The proposal would narrow and carefully define the circumstances in which the president can deploy troops, provide for a congressional review and approval process and enable judicial review of claims that the legal criteria for deployment were not met. It’s a proposal worth adopting.I’m not naïve. I recognize that it will be difficult if not impossible for any reform bill to pass Congress. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-led House of Representatives, was a central player in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Many of Trump’s congressional allies share his thirst for vengeance. But it’s past time to highlight this problem in the federal code. It’s past time to strip unilateral authority from the president.It’s not hard to imagine what could happen if we don’t. An angry, vindictive president could send regular army troops straight into American cities at the first hint of protest. This would place both the American polity and the American military under immense strain. While the former consequence may be more obvious, the latter is also important. Many soldiers would be deeply unhappy to be deployed against their countrymen and would be rightly concerned that a reckless deployment would be accompanied by reckless orders. Dominating the streets of New York is not the mission they signed up for.When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford. It’s time to take from presidents a power they never should have possessed. No man or woman should be able to unilaterally deploy the armed forces to control America’s streets.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      I Clerked for Justice O’Connor. She Was My Hero, but I Worry About Her Legacy.

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      When I learned that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had died, I felt not just the loss of a world historical figure but also the loss of someone who formed a part of my identity.As a young woman, I was in awe of Justice O’Connor. Her presence on the Supreme Court offered an answer to any doubts I had that I belonged in the law. As a young lawyer, I was lucky enough to work for a year as her law clerk.While clerking for her, I came to understand and appreciate not only her place in history but also her vision of the law. She refused opportunities to issue sweeping opinions that would substitute her ideals for the democratic process. This made it all the more tragic that toward the end of her career, she joined in a decision — Bush v. Gore — that represented a rejection of her cautious approach in favor of a starkly political one.For me, she stands as a shining example of how women — everyone, really — can approach life and work. I witnessed her warmth, humor and humanity while experiencing the gift of learning and seeing the law through her eyes. Those personal and legal impressions have left an enduring mark on me as a person and as a lawyer.At the time Justice O’Connor became a lawyer, women in that role were rare. As has now become familiar lore, after she graduated near the top of her class from Stanford Law School in 1952, she was unable to find work as a lawyer. As a justice, she made sure that opportunities denied to her were available to others. Shortly after I graduated from law school, I joined two other women and one man in her chambers, making a rare majority-woman chamber when just over a third of the clerks for Supreme Court justices were women.I always found it remarkable that I never heard Justice O’Connor talk with any bitterness of the barriers she faced pursuing her career. Instead, she worked hard and without drama to overcome them. Remarkably, that experience did not harden her.She had a wicked sense of humor. The door to our clerks’ office held a photocopied image of her hand with the words “For a pat on the back, lean here.” Her face transformed in an almost girlish way when she laughed, which she did often.When she met with the clerks on Saturday to discuss upcoming cases, she brought us a home-cooked lunch — often something inspired by her Western roots. (One memorable example was tortillas and a cheesy chicken filling, to make a kind of cross between a burrito and a chicken quesadilla. It was a bit of a mess to eat but delicious.) She insisted that we get out of the courthouse and walk with her to see the cherry blossoms, and she took us to one of her favorite museums; once we visited the National Arboretum and lingered at the bonsai exhibit. She believed firmly in the benefits of exercise, and she invited us to join daily aerobics sessions with a group of her friends early in the morning in the basketball court above the Supreme Court chamber, which she delighted in calling the “highest court in the land.”She was also a hopeless romantic, and she was well known for trying to find partners for her single clerks. She met her husband, John, in law school, and they married shortly after graduation. He had received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis when I clerked for her, though that knowledge was not yet public. He often came by her chambers as she worked to maintain a sense of normalcy. She retired in 2006 largely because of his progressing dementia. In a powerful lesson of what it is to love, she was happy for him when he struck up a romance with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient. It was devastating to learn that she was subsequently diagnosed with dementia herself.When I clerked for her in 1998 and ’99, she was at the height of her powers. She was the unquestioned swing justice, and some called her the most powerful woman in the world.But she approached the role with humility. Considered a minimalist, she worked to devise opinions that decided the case and usually little more. She was sometimes criticized for that approach. Justice Antonin Scalia made no secret of his frustration. When she refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he snarlingly referred to the opinion as a “jurisprudence of confusion.” She was criticized by many academics for failing to articulate a grand vision of the law.What they missed was that this was her grand vision of the law — or at least of the Supreme Court. She had spent the formative part of her career before she entered the court as a member of the Arizona State Legislature, where she rose to become the first female majority leader of a State Senate.She believed that the most important decisions about how to govern the country belonged to the political branches and to state legislatures, not to a court sitting in Washington. Seeing the law through her eyes during the year I worked for her, I realized that she was not looking for a sweeping theory that would change the face of the law. She wanted to decide the case before her and provide a bit of guidance to the lower courts as necessary but leave the rest to the democratic process.In December 2000, this made reading the opinion she joined in Bush v. Gore all the more heartbreaking. Her vote made a 5-to-4 majority for the decision to halt the recount in Florida rather than allow that process to play out, throwing the election to George W. Bush, who became the first president since 1888 to be elected without winning the popular vote. The decision, widely criticized for its shoddy reasoning, was the opposite of the careful, modest decisions she had spent her career crafting. It disenfranchised voters whose ballots had been rejected by ballot-counting machines in the interests of finality — in the process substituting the judgment of the court for the expressed will of the people.The court showed that it could — and would — behave in nakedly political ways. It had given into the temptation to engage in ends-driven reasoning that was utterly unpersuasive to those who did not already share its view of the right result. In doing so, the court might have opened the door to what has now become something of a habit.Justice O’Connor retired just over five years later, and she was replaced by Samuel Alito. It has been painful to watch as, in decision after decision, he has voted to undo much of the legacy she so carefully constructed. The blunt politics of Bush v. Gore now look less like an embarrassing outlier and more like a turning point toward a court that has cast aside Justice O’Connor’s cautious minimalism for a robustly unapologetic political view of the law. Unsurprisingly, public opinion of the court has fallen to a near historic low.Justice O’Connor remains a transformative figure in the law, a woman who charted a path that I and so many others have followed. If the court is to regain the public trust, it should look, once again, to her shining example, which embodied a powerful ideal: the court is not a body meant to enact the justices’ vision of what the law should be. Its role is, instead, to encourage our imperfect democracy to find its way forward on its own.Oona A. Hathaway is a professor of law and political science at Yale University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      O’Connor’s Most Vital Work Was After She Stepped Down

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      You can tell a lot about a person by what he or she regrets. This holds especially for Supreme Court justices, whose decisions can, with a single vote, upend individual lives and alter the course of history. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said he probably made a mistake in upholding a law criminalizing gay sex; Justice Harry Blackmun was sorry he ever voted to impose the death penalty.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died on Friday at the age of 93, expressed regret publicly over one vote she cast: in the case of Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, a 2002 ruling that judicial candidates could not be prohibited from expressing their views on disputed legal and political issues. Minnesota, like many states that elect judges, had imposed such a ban in order to preserve the appearance of judicial impartiality. The court rejected the ban for violating the First Amendment. The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice O’Connor joining the majority.The court’s ruling led to an explosion of partisan spending on judicial elections around the country and judicial candidates freely spouting their predetermined views on the very issues they would be entrusted to decide if elected.There are many ways to remember Justice O’Connor — as the first woman on the Supreme Court, as one of the justices who saved Roe v. Wade 30 years ago, as the author of the landmark decision protecting affirmative action in 2003. As impressive as those achievements were, they have mostly been surpassed or reversed. What stands out for me is what she said and did after leaving the court.Her response to the 2002 ruling would define most of her last years and underline her commitment to American democracy not just in the halls of justice but also on the ground. It was as if she could see what was coming as the judiciary grew ever more politicized, and she devoted much of her postcourt public life to combating that trend.In March 2006, only weeks after she stepped down, she gave a speech calling out Republican lawmakers for attacking the judiciary. She highlighted the comment by Senator John Cornyn of Texas that deadly violence against judges might be related to their rulings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Wisconsin Judge Dismisses Felony Charge in ‘Ballot Selfie’ Case

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      The debate over a candidate’s photo reflects concerns among states over selfies of ballots and of people showing how they vote. A Wisconsin judge on Monday dismissed a felony charge against a school board candidate who had posted a photograph on Facebook of a ballot with his name filled in.In his ruling, the judge, Paul V. Malloy of Ozaukee County, threw out the count of voter fraud against the man, Paul H. Buzzell, 52, a former school board member in Mequon, a suburb of Milwaukee, who was voted back onto the board during an election in April, online court records show. Judge Malloy ruled on a motion to dismiss by Mr. Buzzell’s lawyers, who argued that the state law prohibiting so-called ballot selfies was overly broad and violated the constitutional guarantee of free expression. “What is at stake is branding a politician a felon for declaring to the world that the politician displayed” a marked ballot “showing a vote for himself in an election,” the motion said. Mr. Burrell would have faced a maximum possible sentence of three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine had he been convicted. He would also have been barred from running for elected office.The case reflects the debate among states over selfies of ballots and of people showing how they vote. Some legislators have argued that public displays of marked ballots can be used to influence voters in an election or to promote vote buying. Others, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say such laws banning voting selfies on social media restrict free speech.Under Wisconsin law, it is an election fraud violation for a person to show his or her marked ballot to someone else, or to mark a ballot so that it is identifiable as his or hers. It is one of at least 18 states that have laws prohibiting selfies displaying a voter’s marked ballot.In 2020, the Wisconsin Senate passed a bill to legalize ballot selfies, but the State Assembly failed to pass a bill that would eliminate the statute, The Associated Press reported.According to a criminal complaint, Mr. Buzzell, 52, published a photograph on Facebook of a marked ballot on March 27 ahead of an election for the Mequon-Thiensville School Board. Witnesses reported the post to the Mequon Police Department as a case of possible election fraud, the complaint said. The photograph of the ballot showed the oval next to Mr. Buzzell’s name filled out as well as that of another candidate, Jason P. Levash, court documents show. Mr. Levash serves as the school board’s vice president, and Mr. Buzzell serves as treasurer. “He displayed a marked ballot showing a vote for himself,” Mr. Buzzell’s lawyer, Michael Chernin, said on Tuesday, adding that Mr. Buzzell indicated that the ballot in question was his daughter’s. Mr. Buzzell, when contacted by the police on April 2, said that “his understanding was that it was not illegal to post a photo of a ballot with his name on it,” the complaint said. He cast his own ballot in person on April 5, according to the complaint.While the dismissal means that the prosecutors’ case cannot move ahead, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which reported on Monday that the charges had been dropped, quoted the Ozaukee County district attorney, Adam Gerol, as saying that he would ask the attorney general to decide whether to file an appeal or issue an opinion. “It’s in the A.G.’s hands,” said Mr. Gerol, a Republican. He did not immediately reply to a message left at his office on Tuesday.The office of Josh Kaul, the attorney general, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Wisconsin Department of Justice would review the district attorney’s request and “proceed appropriately.” More

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      When It Comes to Disdain for Democracy, Trump Has Company

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      It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to our place in this society.It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Donald Trump en campaña: estas son sus propuestas migratorias

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      El expresidente Donald Trump está planeando una expansión extrema de sus medidas represivas contra la migración aplicadas durante su primer mandato si logra regresar al poder en 2025, incluida la preparación de redadas a gran escala de personas que viven en Estados Unidos sin permiso legal y concentrarlas en campamentos cada vez más extensos mientras esperan a ser expulsados.Estos planes restringirían en gran medida tanto la inmigración legal como la ilegal de muchas maneras.Trump quiere revivir las políticas fronterizas de su primer periodo, entre ellas la prohibición del ingreso de personas de ciertas naciones con mayoría musulmana y la reinstauración de una política de la era de la COVID-19 de rechazar solicitudes de asilo, aunque en esta oportunidad basaría el rechazo en aseveraciones de que los migrantes portan otras enfermedades infecciosas como tuberculosis.Trump planea desalojar del país a inmigrantes que habitan aquí sin permiso legal y deportar a millones de personas cada año.Para ayudar a acelerar las deportaciones masivas, Trump está preparando una gran ampliación de una forma de remoción que no requiere de audiencias con el debido proceso. Para ayudar al Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por su sigla en inglés) a llevar a cabo redadas masivas, Trump planea reasignar otros agentes federales y sumar a la tarea a policías municipales y efectivos de la Guardia Nacional aportados voluntariamente por los estados gobernados por republicanos.Para aliviar la presión sobre los centros de detención del ICE, Trump desea construir campamentos enormes para detener personas mientras sus casos son procesados y esperan sus vuelos de deportación. Además, con el fin de sortear cualquier negativa del Congreso para apropiarse de los recursos necesarios, Trump redirigiría dinero del presupuesto del ejército, como lo hizo en su primer mandato para invertir más dinero en el muro fronterizo del que el Congreso había autorizado.“Trump desatará el vasto arsenal de poderes federales para implementar la represión migratoria más espectacular”, dijo Stephen Miller, el exasesor de Trump en la Casa Blanca, quien fue el principal arquitecto de sus esfuerzos de control fronterizo.Cooper Neill para The New York TimesEn una referencia pública a sus planes, Trump le dijo a una multitud en Iowa en septiembre: “Siguiendo el modelo de Eisenhower, llevaremos a cabo la operación de deportación nacional más grande en la historia de Estados Unidos”. La referencia en cuestión fue una campaña de 1954 para arrestar y expulsar a inmigrantes mexicanos que recibió su nombre de un insulto étnico: “Operación Espalda Mojada”.La gran cantidad de planes para 2025 de Trump equivale a un ataque a la migración a una escala nunca antes vista en la historia estadounidense moderna. Millones de migrantes que viven en Estados Unidos sin permiso legal tendrían prohibida la entrada al país o serían desarraigados después de años o incluso décadas de haberse establecido aquí.Tal escala de expulsiones planeadas generaría retos logísticos, financieros y diplomáticos y sería impugnada de manera enérgica en los tribunales. Sin embargo, no hay duda de la magnitud y ambición del cambio que Trump está contemplando.En una segunda presidencia de Trump, se cancelarían las visas de los estudiantes extranjeros que hayan participado en manifestaciones en contra de Israel o propalestinas. Los funcionarios consulares estadounidenses en el extranjero recibirían instrucciones de profundizar la revisión ideológica de los solicitantes de visa para bloquear a personas que el gobierno de Trump considere que tienen actitudes indeseables. A las personas con un estatus de protección temporal porque provienen de ciertos países considerados inseguros, lo que les permite vivir y trabajar legalmente en Estados Unidos, se les revocaría ese estatus.De forma similar, muchas personas a quienes se les ha permitido residir en el país temporalmente por razones humanitarias también perderían ese estatus y tendrían que abandonar el país, incluyendo a decenas de miles de afganos desalojados durante la toma del poder de los talibanes en 2021 a quienes se les permitió ingresar a Estados Unidos. Los afganos que poseen visas especiales concedidas a personas que ayudaron a las fuerzas estadounidenses serían investigados de nuevo para verificar que de verdad colaboraron.Además, Trump intentaría poner fin a la ciudadanía por nacimiento para los bebés nacidos en Estados Unidos de padres que viven en el país sin permiso legal mediante la proclamación de que esa política será la nueva posición del gobierno y la instrucción a las agencias de dejar de emitir documentos que comprueben la ciudadanía de esos bebés, como tarjetas de Seguridad Social y pasaportes. La legitimidad legal de esa política, como casi todos los planes de Trump, seguramente terminará debatiéndose en la Corte Suprema.En entrevistas con The New York Times, varios asesores de Trump dieron la descripción más amplia y detallada hasta la fecha de la agenda migratoria del expresidente para un posible segundo mandato. En particular, la campaña de Trump delegó las preguntas para este artículo a Stephen Miller, un arquitecto de las políticas migratorias del primer periodo de Trump que se mantiene cercano al exmandatario y que muy probablemente tendría un cargo importante en su segundo periodo.Miller afirmó en una entrevista que tocó múltiples temas que todos los pasos que los asesores de Trump se están preparando para dar se basan en estatutos existentes; aunque es posible que el equipo de Trump intente renovar las leyes de inmigración, el plan fue elaborado para no necesitar nueva legislación sustantiva. Además, aunque Miller reconoce que surgirían demandas para impugnar casi cada una de las medidas, describió la intimidante variedad de tácticas del equipo de Trump como un “ataque veloz” diseñado para abrumar a los abogados de derechos de los migrantes.“Cualquier activista que dude en lo más mínimo de la determinación del presidente Trump está cometiendo un error drástico: Trump desatará el vasto arsenal de poderes federales para implementar la represión migratoria más espectacular”, dijo Miller, quien agregó: “Los activistas legales de la inmigración no entenderán lo que estará pasando”.Todd Schulte, presidente de FWD.us, un grupo de defensa de la inmigración y la justicia penal que combatió repetidas veces al gobierno de Trump, dijo que los planes del equipo de Trump se basaban en una “demagogia xenófoba” que atrae a su base política más radical.“Los estadounidenses deben entender que estas propuestas políticas son parte de una agenda autoritaria, a menudo ilegal, que destrozaría casi todos los aspectos de la vida estadounidense: hundiría la economía y violaría los derechos civiles básicos de millones de inmigrantes y estadounidenses nativos por igual”, dijo Schulte.‘Envenenando la sangre’Migrantes se congregan frente al Hotel Roosevelt en Manhattan en agosto, esperando ser procesados.Jeenah Moon para The New York TimesDesde que Trump dejó el cargo, el ambiente político en lo referente a la inmigración se ha movido en su dirección. Ahora es más capaz de aprovechar ese entorno si es reelecto de lo que lo era cuando ganó la elección como un candidato recién llegado a la política.El retroceso de la pandemia de COVID-19 y la reanudación del flujo de los viajes han contribuido a generar una crisis migratoria global, con millones de venezolanos y centroamericanos que huyen de la convulsión en sus países y africanos que llegan a naciones latinoamericanas antes de continuar su viaje hacia el norte. A causa de las cifras récord de inmigrantes en la frontera sur y en ciudades como Nueva York y Chicago, los votantes están frustrados e incluso algunos demócratas piden medidas más duras contra los inmigrantes y presionan a la Casa Blanca para que maneje mejor la crisis.Trump y sus asesores han visto la oportunidad y ahora saben mejor cómo aprovecharla. Los asistentes en los que Trump confió en los caóticos primeros días de su primer mandato a veces estaban en desacuerdo y les faltaba experiencia acerca de cómo manipular las palancas del poder federal. Hacia el final de su primer mandato, los funcionarios del gabinete y los abogados que intentaron frenar algunas de sus acciones —como su secretario de Seguridad Nacional y jefe de personal John Kelly— habían sido despedidos y quienes permanecieron con él habían aprendido mucho.En un segundo mandato, Trump planea instalar un equipo que no lo restringirá.Desde que gran parte de la represión a la migración del primer mandato de Trump enfrentó problemas para avanzar en los tribunales, el entorno legal se ha inclinado a su favor: sus cuatro años de nombramientos judiciales dejaron tribunales federales de apelación y una Corte Suprema mucho más conservadores que los tribunales que escucharon las impugnaciones a las políticas de su primer mandato.La lucha contra la Acción Diferida para los Llegados en la Infancia (DACA, por su sigla en inglés) es un ejemplo de ello.DACA es un programa de la era de Obama que protege de la deportación y concede permisos de trabajo a personas que ingresaron a Estados Unidos de forma ilegal cuando eran niños. Trump trató de ponerle fin, pero la Corte Suprema lo bloqueó por motivos procesales en junio de 2020.Miller indicó que Trump intentaría de nuevo acabar con DACA. Además, la mayoría cinco a cuatro en la Corte Suprema que bloqueó el último intento ya no existe: algunos meses después del fallo sobre DACA, la magistrada Ruth Bader Ginsburg falleció y Trump la remplazó con un sexto miembro conservador, la magistrada Amy Coney Barrett.La retórica de Trump se ha mantenido bien sincronizada con su agenda cada vez más extrema en materia de inmigración.Su avivamiento del miedo y la ira hacia los inmigrantes —presionando por un muro fronterizo y llamando “violadores” a los mexicanos— impulsó su toma del poder del Partido Republicano en 2016. Como presidente, reflexionó en privado sobre la posibilidad de desarrollar una frontera militarizada como la de Israel, preguntó si los migrantes que cruzaban la frontera podrían recibir disparos en las piernas y apoyó un muro fronterizo propuesto rematado con púas desgarrantes y pintado de negro para quemar la piel de los migrantes.Mientras ha hecho campaña para la tercera nominación presidencial consecutiva del partido, su tono antiinmigrante no ha hecho más que volverse más duro. En una entrevista reciente con un sitio web de derecha, Trump afirmó, sin pruebas, que los líderes extranjeros estaban vaciando deliberadamente sus “manicomios” para enviar a los pacientes a través de la frontera sur de Estados Unidos como migrantes. Dijo que los inmigrantes estaban “envenenando la sangre de nuestro país”. En un mitin el miércoles en Florida, los comparó con el asesino en serie y caníbal ficticio Hannibal Lecter, diciendo: “Eso es lo que está entrando a nuestro país en este momento”.De manera similar, Trump había prometido llevar a cabo deportaciones masivas cuando se postuló para el cargo en 2016, pero el gobierno solo logró varios cientos de miles de deportaciones por año bajo su presidencia, a la par de otros gobiernos recientes. Si tienen otra oportunidad, Trump y su equipo están decididos a alcanzar cifras anuales de millones.Mantener fuera a la genteMigrantes esperan ser escoltados por agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza a un área de procesamiento, en septiembre. El avivamiento del miedo y la ira hacia los inmigrantes causado por Trump impulsó su toma del poder del Partido Republicano en 2016. Mark Abramson para The New York TimesEl plan migratorio de Trump es continuar donde se quedó e ir mucho más lejos. No solo reviviría algunas de las políticas que fueron calificadas de draconianas durante su presidencia, muchas de las cuales eliminó la Casa Blanca de Joe Biden, sino que también las ampliaría y las haría más estrictas.Un ejemplo se centra en expandir las políticas del primer periodo dirigidas a mantener a personas extranjeras fuera del país. Trump planea suspender el programa de refugiados y volver a prohibir de manera categórica el ingreso de visitantes de países problemáticos poniendo de nuevo en marcha una versión de su prohibición a los viajes desde varios países principalmente de mayoría musulmana, lo que el presidente Biden calificó de discriminatorio y canceló en su primer día en el cargo.Miller señaló que Trump también utilizaría diplomacia coercitiva para inducir a otros países a colaborar, incluso haciendo de la cooperación una condición para cualquier otro compromiso bilateral. Por ejemplo, un segundo gobierno de Trump buscaría restablecer un acuerdo con México para que los solicitantes de asilo permanezcan en ese país mientras sus peticiones son procesadas (no hay certeza de que México lo acepte; un tribunal mexicano ha precisado que ese trato viola los derechos humanos).Trump también intentaría revivir los acuerdos de “tercer país seguro” con varios países de Centroamérica y establecer acuerdos similares en África, Asia y Sudamérica. En virtud de esos acuerdos, los países aceptan recibir a posibles solicitantes de asilo de otras naciones específicas y permitirles solicitar asilo ahí.Aunque estos acuerdos tradicionalmente solo han cubierto a los inmigrantes que pasaron previamente por un tercer país, la ley federal no exige ese límite y un segundo gobierno de Trump buscaría hacer esos acuerdos sin él, en parte como un disuasivo para los inmigrantes que hacen lo que el equipo de Trump considera solicitudes de asilo ilegítimas.Miller añadió que, al mismo tiempo, los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades de Estados Unidos (CDC, por su sigla en inglés) invocarían la ley de poderes de emergencia de salud pública conocida como Título 42 para rehusarse de nuevo a escuchar cualquier petición de asilo de personas que lleguen a la frontera sur. El gobierno de Trump había discutido internamente esa idea a principios del mandato de Trump, pero algunos secretarios del gabinete se opusieron con el argumento de que no había una emergencia de salud pública que la justificara legalmente. Al final, el gobierno la implementó durante la pandemia de coronavirus.Tras afirmar que desde entonces la idea ha ganado aceptación en la práctica —Biden inicialmente mantuvo la política— Miller aseguró que Trump invocaría el Título 42 y daría como razones “cepas graves de influenza, tuberculosis, sarna, otras enfermedades respiratorias como el virus respiratorio sincitial y más, o simplemente el problema general de que la migración masiva es una amenaza para la salud pública que trae una variedad de enfermedades transmisibles”.Trump y sus asistentes aún no han dicho si reimplementarían uno de los elementos disuasorios más polémicos a la inmigración no autorizada que impulsó como presidente: separar a los niños de sus padres, lo que provocó traumas entre los inmigrantes y dificultades para reunir a las familias. Cuando se le presionó, Trump se negó en repetidas ocasiones a descartar revivir la política. Después de muestras de indignación por la práctica, Trump le puso fin en 2018 y, más tarde, un juez impidió que el gobierno volviera a ponerla en efecto.Deportaciones masivasAgentes federales de inmigración concentrados para una operación de arresto en mayo en Pompano Beach, Florida.Saul Martinez para The New York TimesPoco después de que Trump anunció su campaña presidencial para 2024 en noviembre pasado, se reunió con Tom Homan, quien dirigió el ICE durante el primer año y medio del gobierno de Trump y fue uno de los primeros en proponer la separación de familias para disuadir a los inmigrantes.En una entrevista, Homan recordó que en esa reunión “aceptó regresar” para un segundo mandato y afirmó que “ayudaría a organizar y dirigir la operación de deportación más grande jamás vista en este país”.La visión de los asesores de Trump de deportaciones masivas abruptas llevaría a una convulsión social y económica, lo que perturbaría el mercado de la vivienda e industrias importantes como la agricultura y el sector de servicios.Miller presentó tal perturbación desde una perspectiva favorable.“La deportación masiva será una alteración del mercado laboral celebrada por los trabajadores estadounidenses, a quienes ahora se les ofrecerán salarios más altos con mejores beneficios para ocupar estos puestos de trabajo”, dijo. “Los estadounidenses también celebrarán el hecho de que las leyes de nuestra nación ahora se aplican por igual y que un grupo selecto ya no está mágicamente exento”.Un paso planeado para superar los obstáculos legales y logísticos sería incrementar de manera significativa una forma de deportaciones rápidas conocida como “remoción acelerada”. Esta les niega a los migrantes que viven en el país sin un permiso legal las audiencias habituales y la oportunidad de presentar apelaciones, las cuales pueden tardar meses o años (en especial cuando las personas no están en custodia) y han llevado a un atraso enorme en el procesamiento de los casos. Una ley de 1996 señala que las personas pueden ser sujetas a la remoción acelerada hasta dos años después de su llegada, pero, hasta el momento, el poder ejecutivo la ha usado con mayor cautela expulsando enseguida a personas descubiertas cerca de la frontera poco después de haber cruzado.El gobierno de Trump intentó ampliar el uso de la remoción acelerada, pero un tribunal la bloqueó y después el equipo de Biden canceló la ampliación. No se sabe si la Corte Suprema determinará que es constitucional utilizar la ley contra personas que han vivido durante un periodo significativo en Estados Unidos y expresan temor de persecución si son enviados a su país natal.Trump también ha mencionado que invocaría una ley arcaica, la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros de 1798, para expulsar a sospechosos de ser miembros de los cárteles de droga y pandillas criminales sin debido proceso. La ley permite deportaciones sumarias de personas provenientes de países con los que Estados Unidos está en guerra, que han invadido Estados Unidos o que han participado en “incursiones predatorias”.Tom Homan, quien dirigió el ICE durante el primer año y medio del gobierno de Trump, afirmó que le dijo al expresidente que “ayudaría a organizar y dirigir la operación de deportación más grande jamás vista en este país”.Rebecca Noble para The New York TimesLa Corte Suprema ha permitido usos en el pasado de esa ley en tiempos de guerra. Sin embargo, su redacción parece requerir un vínculo con las acciones de un gobierno extranjero, así que no se sabe si los magistrados estarían de acuerdo en que un presidente la estire para que abarque la actividad de los cárteles de la droga.De manera más general, Miller manifestó que un nuevo gobierno de Trump pasaría de la práctica del ICE de arrestar a personas específicas a llevar a cabo redadas en lugares de trabajo y otros lugares públicos destinadas a arrestar de una sola vez a grandes cantidades de inmigrantes que viven en el país sin permiso legal.Miller comentó que para hacer que el proceso de encontrar y deportar a los inmigrantes que ya viven en del país sin permiso legal sea “radicalmente más rápido y eficiente”, el equipo de Trump incluiría a “los tipos correctos de abogados y de formuladores de políticas” dispuestos a llevar a cabo tales ideas.Además, debido a la magnitud de los arrestos y deportaciones que se contemplan, planean construir “enormes instalaciones de detención que funcionarían como centros de preparación” para inmigrantes mientras avanzan sus casos y esperan ser trasladados en avión a otros países.Miller declaró que es posible que los nuevos campamentos se construyan “en terrenos abiertos en Texas cerca de la frontera”.Relató que el ejército los construiría bajo la autoridad y control del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional. Aunque advirtió que aún no había planos específicos, dijo que los campamentos luicirían profesionales y similares a otras instalaciones para migrantes que se han construido cerca de la frontera.Estos campos también podrían permitirle al gobierno incrementar el ritmo y el volumen de las deportaciones de personas indocumentadas que han vivido en Estados Unidos durante años y por lo tanto no están sujetas a la expulsión por la vía rápida. Si realizar un esfuerzo a largo plazo para obtener un permiso para permanecer en el país significara permanecer encerrados mientras tanto, algunos podrían darse por vencidos y aceptar de forma voluntaria la expulsión sin pasar por el proceso completo.El uso de estos campamentos, dijo Miller, probablemente se centraría más en adultos solteros porque el gobierno no puede retener a niños de forma indefinida bajo una orden judicial de larga data conocida como el acuerdo Flores. Por lo tanto, cualquier familia llevada a las instalaciones tendría que entrar y salir más rápidamente, dijo.El gobierno de Trump intentó revocar el acuerdo Flores, pero la Corte Suprema no resolvió el asunto antes de que terminara el mandato de Trump. Miller afirmó que el equipo de Trump lo intentaría de nuevo.Miller añadió que para incrementar el número de agentes disponibles para las redadas del ICE, funcionarios de otras agencias federales del orden serían reasignados temporalmente y efectivos de la Guardia Nacional estatal y policías locales, al menos de estados liderados por republicanos dispuestos a hacerlo, serían sumados a los esfuerzos de control de la inmigración.Si bien una ley conocida como Ley Posse Comitatus generalmente prohíbe el uso de las fuerzas armadas con fines de mantenimiento del orden público, otra ley llamada Ley de Insurrección crea una excepción. Miller aseguró que Trump invocaría la Ley de Insurrección en la frontera, lo que permitiría el uso de tropas federales para detener a los inmigrantes.“En resumen”, concluyó Miller, “el presidente Trump hará lo que sea necesario”.Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Sweeping Raids and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former White House aide who was the chief architect of his border control efforts.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesIn a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.And Mr. Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Mr. Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team’s plans relied on “xenophobic demagoguery” that appeals to his hardest-core political base.“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Mr. Schulte said.‘Poisoning the Blood’Migrants gather outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in August, waiting to be processed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSince Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re-elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.The ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.Mr. Trump and his advisers see the opening, and now know better how to seize it. The aides Mr. Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John F. Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.In a second term, Mr. Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.Since much of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Mr. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Mr. Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”Mr. Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Mr. Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.Keeping People OutMigrants wait to be escorted by Border Patrol agents to a processing area in September. Mr. Trump’s stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much farther. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Mr. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically bar visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.Mr. Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Mr. Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to re-establish an agreement with Mexico that asylum seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)Mr. Trump would also push to revive “safe third country” agreements with several nations in Central America, and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.At the same time, Mr. Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Mr. Trump’s term, but some cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice — Mr. Biden initially kept the policy — Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would invoke Title 42, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”Mr. Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would re-enact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Mr. Trump ended it in 2018 and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.Mass DeportationsFederal immigration-enforcement officers gathered for an arrest operation in May in Pompano Beach, Fla.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesSoon after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.In an interview, Mr. Homan recalled that in that meeting, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.Mr. Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies undocumented immigrants the opportunity to seek asylum hearings and file appeals, which can take months or years — especially when people are not in custody — and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.The Trump administration tried to expand the use of expedited removal, but a court blocked it and then the Biden team canceled the expansion. It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will rule that it is constitutional to use the law against people who have been living for a significant period in the United States and express fear of persecution if sent home.Mr. Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration, said he told Mr. Trump he would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe Supreme Court has upheld past uses of that law in wartime. But its text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the justices will allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity.More broadly, Mr. Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once. While every administration has used detention facilities, because of the magnitude of deportations being contemplated, the Trump team plans to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for migrants waiting to be flown to other countries, Mr. Miller said. Such an undertaking would be fast-tracked, he said, “by bringing in the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers” — taking what is typically a methodical process “and making it radically more quick and efficient.”Mr. Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.” He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.The use of these camps, he said, would likely be focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement. So any families brought to the facilities would have to be moved in and out more quickly, Mr. Miller said.The Trump administration tried to overturn the Flores settlement, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the matter before Mr. Trump’s term ended. Mr. Miller said the Trump team would try again.To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Mr. Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.While a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids the use of the armed forces for law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Mr. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act at the border, enabling the use of federal troops to apprehend migrants, Mr. Miller said.“Bottom line,” he said, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Alarmed by Off-Year Losses, Mainstream Republicans Balk at Abortion Curbs

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      Worried about alienating critical blocs of voters, House Republicans from competitive districts are digging in against using spending bills for abortion and contraception restrictions.Two days after Republicans across the country suffered a drubbing, dragged down by their opposition to abortion rights in the off-year elections, G.O.P. leaders on Capitol Hill appeared not to have gotten the memo.House Republicans tried on Thursday to use a financial services spending bill to chip away at a District of Columbia law aimed at protecting employees from being discriminated against for seeking contraceptive or abortion services. Tucked inside the otherwise dry bill was a line barring federal funds from being used to enforce that law.But minutes ahead of an expected vote, Republicans were forced to pull the legislation from the floor. Mainstream G.O.P. lawmakers from competitive districts — concerned that their party’s opposition to abortion rights has alienated women — appeared unwilling to support the abortion-related restriction, sapping the measure of the votes necessary to pass.It was the latest reflection of the deep divisions among Republicans that have prevented them, for the moment, from coalescing around a strategy for averting a government shutdown.But this time, it was also an illustration of yet another disconnect — between a small group of Republicans in Congress who are trying to pivot away from an anti-abortion message that voters have rejected and a much larger coalition, including the party’s leaders, who are doubling down.Tuesday’s election results drove home to some Republicans in Congress what they already know and fear — that their party has alienated critical blocs of voters with its policies and message, particularly on abortion. And the results stiffened their resolve to resist such measures, even if it means breaking with the party at a critical time in a high-stakes fight over federal spending.“The American people are speaking very clearly: There is no appetite for national abortion law,” Representative John Duarte of California, a Republican who represents a district that President Biden won in 2020, said on Thursday. “And there’s enough of us in the Republican Party that are going to stand against it.”Given Republicans’ tiny majority, which allows them to lose only four votes on their side if all Democrats show up and unite in opposition, that resistance could be decisive. Between mainstream Republicans’ resistance to the abortion provision in the financial services bill and rising discontent among the hard-right flank that the legislation did not include a measure barring funding for a new F.B.I. building, it became clear the bill did not have the votes.Mr. Duarte said he and other more center-leaning Republicans had warned party leaders that they would be inclined to oppose other spending bills that contained “abortion language not core to a bill.” He said he would prefer that those provisions be pulled out of the spending bills and voted on separately.Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who also represents a district that Mr. Biden won in 2020, told reporters that he, too, had opposed the financial services bill because of the abortion-related language.The rare pushback from members who represent the political middle of the Republican conference came two days after Ohio voters resoundingly approved a ballot measure enshrining a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution.The message that abortion remains the most potent political issue for Democrats was clear even where abortion itself was not on the ballot. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, rode to victory after criticizing his Republican opponent’s defense of the state’s near-total abortion ban. And in Virginia, legislative candidates who opposed the 15-week abortion ban proposed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, prevailed.Ohio voters resoundingly approved a ballot measure enshrining a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn the House, however, gerrymandering has made most Republican seats so safe that lawmakers routinely cater to the far-right wing of their party, and a slim majority has given hard-right lawmakers outsized influence. The result has been that House Republicans continue to draft legislation that is out of step with a vast majority of voters, including some of their own constituents, on social issues.That has forced Republicans from competitive districts to take politically perilous votes that many of them fear will cost them their seats, as well as the House majority, next year.In September, Representative Marc Molinaro, one of six New York Republicans who represent districts that Mr. Biden won in 2020, objected to an agriculture spending bill because it included language that would restrict access to mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill.That measure, which would fund the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration, ultimately collapsed on the House floor when other Republicans joined Mr. Molinaro in opposing it because of that specific restriction.Democrats had already swung into action to hammer Republicans on the issue. After the legislation was approved by the Appropriations Committee, the House Democrats’ campaign arm accused five vulnerable Republicans on the panel who voted to advance the bill of “putting the health and livelihoods of countless women at risk.”Then, after the bill failed on the floor, the House Democrats’ main super PAC hammered politically vulnerable Republicans who supported it, calling them “anti-abortion extremists.”On Thursday, Mr. Molinaro was part of the small group of Republicans who balked at supporting the financial services bill because of the anti-abortion language tucked inside.“There are approximately five to eight who aren’t supportive because of these provisions,” Mr. Molinaro said. “We must respect and love women faced with such difficult choices.”Mr. Molinaro said he opposed a national ban on abortion. While he noted that he was against late-term abortions, he said he did not want to impose any further abortion restrictions at the federal level — including through spending bills.“My constituents have reinforced my view, and results in Ohio may well confirm a position for that state,” he added.Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, has long railed against her party for not doing enough to show compassion to women. She has said that G.O.P. leaders are making Republicans like her from moderate districts “walk the plank” with abortion votes. Ms. Mace said on Thursday that she was part of the group of lawmakers Mr. Molinaro was referring to who would not support spending bills that quietly tried to expand abortion restrictions.“We can’t save lives, if we can’t win elections,” Ms. Mace posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night as the election results became clear. “We need to talk about common sense abortion restrictions, while also promoting expanded access to contraception including over the counter.”Still, there are major minefields ahead. Senior House appropriators are planning as soon as next week to bring up the bill that funds the Labor Department and the Department of Heath and Human Services, which includes multiple anti-abortion measures. Democrats argue those measures are aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood and making funding for Title X, the nation’s family planning program, less accessible. The legislation also would target programs that provide referrals or information about abortion.While the bill does not single out Planned Parenthood by name, it includes a provision that would bar sending federal funds to “community providers” that are “primarily engaged in family planning services, reproductive health and related medical care.” It includes exceptions for abortions performed in the case of rape or incest, or in instances in which the mother’s life is endangered.It is exactly the type of legislation that mainstream Republicans like Mr. Duarte are warning against.“A lot of us in swing districts — a lot of us that want to be very respectful of where the American people are and aren’t on these social issues — are standing our ground,” Mr. Duarte said. More