President Donald Trump is preparing to invoke wartime powers—even though the country isn’t at war—to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
During his first month in office, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security deported 37,660 people, far fewer than the 57,000 people per month who were deported during the last full year of former President Joe Biden’s administration, when illegal border crossings were higher, Reuters reported.
That puts Trump on track to deport about 450,000 undocumented immigrations per year—or about 1.8 million over the course of his term—despite the president and his “border czar” Tom Homan promising 10 million to 12 million deportations.
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In an attempt to speed things up, Trump has purged top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and has vowed to open up new avenues for arrests and removals.
Now he’s preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to give his administration sweeping wartime powers to expel immigrants without having to go through the court system, according to CNN.
Administration officials are in talks with several agencies to try to figure out how they can implement the law despite the U.S. not being at war.
The law explicitly applies in the case of “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government.” Declaring a national emergency or designating a specific group—such as a gang or drug cartel—as a terrorist organization likely wouldn’t count, legal experts told CNN.
Trump has nevertheless declared the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang a foreign terrorist organization as a “first step” to invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a White House source told CNN.
Conservative legal advocates have argued the administration could get around the law’s restrictions by arguing that certain countries are basically “mafia states” where organized crime has taken over the government.
The president discussed the Alien Enemies Act on the campaign trail and reiterated his plans to use it during his inaugural address, and civil rights groups have already vowed to fight it.
“There is no military invasion or military predatory incursion being perpetrated by an actual foreign nation or government,” Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center at New York University told CNN in January. “And so, irrespective of how broadly or narrowly he would like to apply it, we would oppose any invocation as an abuse of a wartime authority.”
The Alien Enemies Act doesn’t distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants. The last time it was invoked was during World War II, when 30,000 immigrants from Japan, Germany, and Italy were sent to internment camps, according to CNN.
(Japanese Americans with U.S. citizenship were interned separately under an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt.)
As Trump’s deportation numbers flounder, his administration has repeatedly moved the goal posts on whom they plan to deport.
After initially vowing to focus on murderers and other convicted criminals, ICE is now trying to raid churches and has announced it will target unaccompanied children.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that undocumented immigrants must register and get fingerprinted within 30 days of entering the U.S., or else they could be fined or jailed for violating with federal law.
That checks with Trump’s Alien Enemies Act plan, which would allow him to suddenly classify thousands of law-abiding immigrants as “alien enemies.”
