You can almost hear Stephen Miller salivating in a New York Times article that was based on their “wide-ranging interview” as well as interviews with other Trump advisers.
Bandwidth and my blood pressure prevent me from going into all the details, but here are some of the terrifying “highlights”:
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
But wait, there’s more: The Times said the Trump administration will “expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” Is there any doubt Trump’s “Thought Police” will be unleashed on citizens, too?
Oh, yeah, Trump and Cyborg Miller want to end birthright citizenship, too.
These plans would not be easy to instate, The Times points out. And they would be “a recipe for social and economic turmoil,” given how much our economy depends on immigrants and how embedded they are in everyday American life and culture. But Miller thinks his dystopian vision is really a utopian one that will be “celebrated” by Americans.
Personally, I doubt most of this would ever get accomplished, even if Trump manages to get back into office and stay out of jail. It sounds a lot like the “border wall paid for by Mexico” plan, but on steroids, and Trump only managed to build 52 miles of new wall along the nearly 2,000-mile border, none of it paid by Mexico.
But he was able to implement some horrible policies, such as separating children from their families. If Miller and Trump can turn even a fraction of their latest wet dream into real life, it would be dreadful, ghastly and monstrous.
