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Donald Trump said he plans to have federal law enforcement protect the southern border and relocate troops stationed overseas.
In a speech at a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, the former president said he wants to move employees at agencies such as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to help control what Trump called an invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The hardline immigration remarks from Trump came after he was condemned by the White House and others for echoing rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler after he claimed during a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the United States.
The comments also came after Trump, the front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, recently said that he'll only act as a "dictator" on "day one" if he returns to the White House.
"I will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI and DHS," Trump said in Reno. "And I will make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion of our country, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas in countries that don't like us.
"They laugh at our current president, they think he's a fool and we shouldn't be there. We have to protect our own borders first. Before we defend the borders of foreign countries, we have to get our act together. We have to be able to do it for ourselves."
The remarks came days after Rolling Stone, cited unnamed sources, reported that Trump is hoping to deploy between 100,000 and 300,000 troops to the border if he wins the election as he aims to ramp up his immigration policies during a second term.
In October 2018, Trump announced that he would send more than 5,200 troops to the southern borders in Texas, California and Arizona to bolster the defense and stop a migrant caravan. In October 2021, The New York Times reported that Trump's former defense secretary, Mark Esper, quashed a plan put forward by Trump adviser Stephen Miller to send as many as 250,000 troops to the southern border.
In his 2022 book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, Esper said he told Miller: "The U.S. armed forces don't have 250,000 troops to send to the border for such nonsense."
Trump previously hinted that he would invoke the Insurrection Act to allow him to use essentially military personnel to act as law enforcement in the U.S., although it is unclear if it would be to clamp down on illegal migrant crossings. The Insurrection Act allows presidents to call on reserve or active-duty military units to respond to civil unrest in the U.S.
"The problem with the Insurrection Act is that it is not the carefully crafted break-glass-in-case-of-emergency kind of tool that it should be," Joseph Nunn, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Rolling Stone. "Instead, the Insurrection Act gives essentially unlimited discretion to the president to use the military as a domestic police force."
Newsweek has reached out to Trump's office via email for comment.
Trump has said he would act as "dictator" if reelected president on his first day to implement some of his policies, including building a wall on the southern border.
On Saturday, President Joe Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa accused Trump of having "parroted Adolf Hitler" with his comments in New Hampshire, in which he said immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."
"Tonight Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy," Moussa said. "He is betting he can win this election by scaring and dividing this country. He's wrong. In 2020, Americans chose President Biden's vision of hope and unity over Trump's vision of fear and division—and they'll do the same next November."
Reacting to the criticism, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek that the former president "gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park in front of over 10,000 people" in Durham on Saturday.
"Contrast that with mainstream media and academia-at-large who have given safe haven for dangerous antisemitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming considering what is going on in the world," he said.
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About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more