This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 18, 2016:
Donald
As the November presidential election draws closer and Trump draws closer to Hillary in the polls, skeptics are beginning to ask some hard questions: If Trump wins, just how is he going to keep his promise to deport 11 million illegal aliens over the next two years? How is he going to build the Mexico – US wall to keep them from returning? How much will that cost? How long will that take?
The math is daunting: 15,000 people would have to be arrested, served with deportation papers, have their day in court, and then be deported, EVERY DAY. There are 20,000 Border Control agents who are already overworked and spread thin across the 1,989 miles of the Mexican-US border.
Assuming he overcomes that obstacle, just how is he going to manage completing the wall to keep them from coming back in? It's estimated that completing the wall will cost $25 billion and take 40,000 workers four years to do the job. Just in time for the end of his first term.
He has, until now, made general statements to energize his audiences and rile up his enemies. Reality will set in with a vengeance starting in January if he wins in November.
Trump proposes creating a separate “deportation force” to do the rounding up, but it's not clear just what that means: cost, officers, authority? Building the wall is even more problematic. Assuming Congress fails to grant funding for the wall, Trump has Plan B: use the Patriot Act to confiscate funds headed from the US to Mexico to pay for it.
Rumors and emails have been flying through the digital universe that Trump will just do what Presidents Hoover, Truman, and eisenhower did before him. They deported millions, they say, so why can't he?
Historical facts get in the way, unfortunately. Brooks Jackson, the founder and now Director Emeritus of FactCheck.org, responded to the email that claimed that “Eisenhower deported 13 million illegal immigrants” during his eight-year administration in the 1950s by looking at history. He found that Eisenhower “did not deport 13 million Mexicans. Only one-tenth that number was ever claimed by the federal officials in charge of ‘Operation Wetback,' and even that figure is criticized as inflated.”
What about Hoover? Didn't he deport millions to create jobs as the Great Depression took hold? No. According to Jackson, Hoover never ordered the deportation of all illegal aliens and just 121,000 were actually deported or induced to leave through threat of deportation.
And Truman? Didn't he deport millions to make room for returning veterans following the end of WWII? Again, no, according to Jackson. In fact, Truman signed legislation protecting the rights of Mexican migrant workers recruited legally to help harvest U.S. crops. During his nearly eight years in office, only about three million illegals were deported or left the country voluntarily.
That's a total of less than six million deported during three separate administrations spread over 20 years. Trump has promised to send home an estimated 11 million in two years. Reality says Oops.
There's another reality Trump will face if he tries to keep his promises: the ACLU is preparing for war against The Donald, claiming that much if not most of his proposals would be unconstitutional.
In introducing “The Trump Memos” released last Friday, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero took Trump to task in the Washington Post for potentially violating almost all of the ten amendments contained in the Bill of Rights:
A Trump administration would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments [to the Constitution] if it tried to implement his most controversial plans.
Added Romero, Trump's plans to deport more than 11 million people during the first two years of his administration “would shred the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures … [it] would run face-first into the due process protections afforded every person inside the United States under the fifth amendment.”
According to Romero, Trump's proposals, in outline form,
Would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment;
Would violate the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments;
Would violate citizens' First Amendment Rights to religion, speech, and association;
Would violate the civil liberties not only of illegal aliens, but of Muslim citizens legally here;
Would result in a breakdown of due process, which presently allows deportation orders to be challenged in federal court;
Would extend the lengthy process already in place to grant citizenship to legal immigrants, which process currently takes 635 calendar days; and
Would violate the privacy Act of 1974, which bars the creation of a Muslim database.
The ACLU is also preparing to battle Trump's belief that the nation's libel laws need to be amended because, according to Trump, “if a paper writes something wrong … and they don't do a retraction, they should” be subject to penalties.
But the ACLU noted that “writing something wrong is constitutionally protected unless the writer knew it was wrong and published it anyway … no legislature, state or federal, is permitted to expand libel liability beyond this constitutional limit. There is, accordingly, no chance that Trump would be able to “open up our libel laws” in the manner that he has proposed.
There are other Trump proposals that the ACLU is preparing to challenge, if necessary. His proposal to “expand waterboarding” would violate the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, as well as the Geneva Convention and the War Crimes Act. His desire to expand mass surveillance would extend a law that the ACLU claims is already unconstitutional under the First and Fourth Amendments.
The ACLU claims that it isn't just picking on Trump. It is currently working up similar charges against Hillary's various proposals to expand the reach and power of government beyond the Constitution.
If Trump wins in November he is going to get a major dose of reality come January 2017. As Romero put it:
Our institutions – particularly our courts – are stronger than the will of one man. But we need to be prepared because the very freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution could come under sustained attack by a President Trump in the Oval Office.
If that day comes, make no mistake: We'll be seeing him in court.
Sources:
How long is the Mexico US border? 1989 miles
ACLU Director: We will defend the constitution against a President Trump
FactCheck.org: Hoover, Truman & Ike: Mass Deporters?
The ACLU's report: The Trump Memos
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