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The Trump administration series of sweeping actions this week is a crackdown on illegal immigration, one of the President's campaign promises. President Trump is sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the border and ending Biden-era border and asylum policies. Not all of his executive orders will have immediate effects, but immigration experts say that taken together, they lay out a blueprint for how Trump aims to dramatically transform enforcement at the border and beyond. NPR's Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: From his first moments in office, President Trump framed the problem of illegal immigration in terms of national security.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.
ROSE: That word, invasion, has become mainstream on the right when talking about immigration, despite objections from immigrant advocates and some Democrats who say it's dehumanizing and deeply misleading, since border crossings have come down from their record highs. But the Trump administration is leaning into it. The word invasion appears frequently in the executive orders he signed this week. It's in the title of two of them, and there may be a very specific legal reason.
ELIZABETH GOITEIN: I was not surprised to hear it at all. I think that was intended to tee up some of the actions he's contemplating now.
ROSE: Elizabeth Goitein is a legal expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit.
GOITEIN: It's been widely understood that the president has inherent constitutional authority to repel sudden attacks or invasions. So these are terms that summon, essentially, war powers.
ROSE: The Trump administration is already using this justification to effectively cut off access to asylum at the southern border. There's another option that the president has talked about using to go after drug cartels, the Alien Enemies Act, which would give him emergency authority to bypass normal immigration law to quickly detain and deport non-citizens. Goitein says it's only been used a few times, most recently during World War II.
GOITEIN: It's quite clear that the framers understood the term to deal with armed attacks by foreign powers. We're talking about acts of war. We are not talking about unlawful immigration.
ROSE: It's not clear if the Trump administration's invasion theory will work in the courts. A federal judge in Texas has already ruled against that state's leaders when they tried to make a similar case. But if Trump's executive orders do hold up, they could help his administration reshape the immigration system and not just at the border. John Sandweg was acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Obama.
JOHN SANDWEG: If you look at these executive orders, it really is all spelled out there and this is exactly where they're going.
ROSE: Sandweg was skeptical that Trump could deliver on his campaign promise to build the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history. That's mainly because of legal and logistical hurdles, including a shortage of detention beds and long backlogs in immigration court. But after looking at this week's executive orders, Sandweg says his thinking has changed. He says the White House could tap military resources and the Alien Enemies Act to speed things up.
SANDWEG: As he is able to bypass those courts entirely and then tap into Department of Defense resources and build detention camps and military bases, mass deportation becomes a much more realistic possibility.
ROSE: Another Trump order has directed the Defense Department to draw up a plan for, quote, "sealing the borders." And that would go far beyond what any recent administration has done there. For now, Trump is only moving 1,500 active-duty troops to the border, and their role is limited to building border barriers and operating flights to send 5,000 migrants a month back to their home countries.
MARK KRIKORIAN: And this is all perfectly legal.
ROSE: Mark Krikorian is with the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower levels of immigration. He says Trump may try to test the boundaries by using active-duty troops to assist directly in immigration enforcement.
KRIKORIAN: Will soldiers be arresting illegal aliens? That'll be an interesting question.
ROSE: One of many questions, as President Trump follows through on the blueprint he laid out this week. Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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