A U.S. Army soldier monitors the border with Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas, last week. President Trump ordered 1,500 more active military personnel to the southern border, part of a broad immigration crackdown during his first week in office.
Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — From his first moments back in office, President Trump framed the problem of illegal immigration in terms of national security.
“I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
That word — invasion — has become mainstreamon the right when talking about immigration, in spite of objections from immigrant advocatesand some Democrats. They argue the term is dehumanizing and also deeply misleading, since border crossings have fallen sharply from their record highs during the Biden administration.
But the Trump administration is leaning into it. The word invasion appears frequently in the executive actions the president signed last week. It’s even in the title of two of them.
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There may be a very specific legal reason for that.
“It’s the key for everything they’re trying to do,” said John Sandweg, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Obama, who now heads the cross-border risks team at the law firm Nixon Peabody.
In its first week, the Trump White House launched a broad crackdown on immigration, one of Trump’s signature campaign promises.
His administration quickly closed off access to the CBP One app and asylum protections at the U.S. border; sent more active duty troops to help with border barriers and removal flights; opened the door for immigration authorities to arrest immigrants in schools, churches and hospitals; and cleared the way for authorities to begin removing more than a million migrants who were legally admitted to the U.S. under the Biden administration.
Not all of Trump’s executive actions will have immediate effects. But taken together, immigration experts say, they lay out a blueprint for how his administration aims to dramatically transform enforcement at the border and beyond.
“This is a significant dialing up,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and a former top immigration official during the Clinton administration.
“It really renames [and] recategorizes immigration as a national security threat,” Meissner said during a recent call with reporters.
Legal experts say framing unlawful migration at the southern border as an invasion may be crucial to the Trump administration’s plans.
“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,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit.
“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,” Goitein said.
The Trump administration is already using this justification to effectively cut off access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico 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 noncitizens.
That authority has been used only a few times, most recently during World War II.
“It’s quite clear that the framers understood the term to deal with armed attacks by foreign powers,” Goitein said. “We’re talking about acts of war. We are not talking about unlawful immigration.”
It’s not clear if the Trump’s administration’s invasion framing 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.
“If you look at these executive orders, it really is all spelled out there,” said Sandweg, the former acting head of ICE.
Like other former immigration officials, 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 Trump’s first round of executive orders and actions, Sandweg’s thinking has changed. The White House could tap military resources and the Alien Enemies Act to speed the deportation process.
“If he’s able to bypass those courts entirely, and then tap into Department of Defense resources to build detention camps in military bases, mass deportation becomes a much more realistic possibility,” Sandweg said in an interview.
Another executive order Trump signed last week directs the Defense Department to draw up a plan to “seal the borders” of the U.S. by “repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking.”
That could potentially go far beyond how any recent administration has used the U.S. military.
For now, Trump has only moved an additional 1,500 active duty troops to the border. Their role is limited to building border barriers, and operating flights to send 5,000 migrants per month back to their home countries.
“This is all perfectly legal,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower levels of immigration.
Krikorian says Trump might try to test the limits by using active duty troops to assist directly in immigration enforcement.
“The troops will be a kind of force multiplier for the Border Patrol. That hasn’t happened yet, and we’ll see how that works,” he said. “Will soldiers be arresting illegal aliens? That’ll be an interesting question.”
That’s one of many legal questions that might come up as Trump follows through on the blueprint he laid out in his first week.
