Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Can’t Happen If US Military Members Resist It

Part of the Series

Communities Beyond Elections

Grab a book instead of my phone had been my mantra since November 5 as I sought to protect myself from the despair of political doomscrolling. Since then, I finished Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I’m now halfway through East of Eden by John Steinbeck and have almost finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird to my 11-year-old daughter. I hadn’t been ready to accept the reality of another four years of Donald Trump.

Then, on November 18, my literary shield was penetrated by a glance at my work computer: “Trump confirms his plan for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will involve a national emergency declaration and the military,” the article in The Washington Post read.

Damn it, this fascist couldn’t even give me a few weeks, was my first thought. My second thought was that I needed to talk to my fellow anti-imperialist veteran friends. I needed a little help reorienting my brain to another four years of Trump’s policies.

They reminded me that this is not the first time Trump has threatened to deploy the military on U.S. soil to terrorize refugees and immigrants.

In 2018, Trump promised to send 15,000 members of the National Guard to the border. In the end, the number was closer to 5,200, which set a dangerous precedent that Republican governors followed by sending National Guard units to Texas starting in January 2024. If Trump’s new threats became a reality, despite being a logistical and legal nightmare, and if he removed the 13 million undocumented immigrants from the country, his plan would cost an estimated $88 billion a year, and almost a trillion dollars over a decade.

Even Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said removing just a million of the 13 million undocumented immigrants would be a Herculean task. Jason Houser, ICE’s chief of staff under President Joe Biden, told “60 Minutes” that, “ICE currently has 6,000 staff members. That number would need to rise to 100,000” to deport the numbers Trump and Stephen Miller are talking about.

Forcefully removing 13 million people from this country would require an enormous construction project. As The Intercept recently reported, Trump’s plan would require at least doubling or tripling the number of carceral facilities in the U.S. The U.S. mass incarceration system already imprisons 1.9 million people in a mixture of federal prisons, state prisons, local jails, juvenile jails and immigration jails — more per capita than any country in the world, by the way. If the prison system doubled or tripled in size, the U.S. landscape would be littered with prisons, more so than it already is.

At a Madison Square Garden rally in October, when Trump said he would “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” attendees erupted in raucous cheers. It’s impossible to quantify the devastation these policies would rain down on families across this country. The emotional impact of deporting 13 million people would amount to state-sponsored terrorism on a scale that only a fascist could endorse.

I asked Lyle Jeremy Rubin, an anti-imperialist Marine veteran and author of Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, about his thoughts on Trump’s plan to deploy the military to enforce his mass deportation project.

“The U.S.-Mexico border has been getting more and more militarized going all the way back to the U.S.-Mexican War,” Rubin told me. “The process accelerated after WWI and even more so with the rise of the postwar national security state in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The ‘war on terror’ brought the violence and repression to whole new levels, especially when it came to the creation of ICE and bringing the war home not just as the border, but across the entirety of the country.”

Rubin added: “If there is any hope of reversing this ominous trendline, Americans will need to come to grips with how corrosive this living history is to what remains of our democracy. A corrosion that arguably facilitated the rise of Trump and Trumpism in the first place. And yes, active-duty and veteran dissidents are uniquely positioned to convey this message to those who need to hear it.”

Soldiers now must find the courage and strength to lay their weapons down and refuse to be an occupying force in their own country.

The only reasonable response to Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations at the hands of active-duty soldiers is for them to say “no.” Like the 206,000 people who resisted the Vietnam War, soldiers now must find the courage and strength to lay their weapons down and refuse to be an occupying force in their own country.

An increasing number of Israeli draft resisters are refusing conscription and deployment to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza; for them too, the only reasonable response is to say “no.”

Everyone who lives in the U.S. has a responsibility to help ensure that soldiers know that saying “no” to their commanding officers is an option. They’ll need our support when it comes to refusing immoral orders.

We could create networks of support through projects such as the revitalization of G.I. coffeehouses, which were powerful organizing spaces in the 1960s.

During the Vietnam War, G.I.s and activists worked together to create a network of more than 25 coffeehouses situated just outside military bases around the country, as well as at overseas bases. Historian David L. Parsons describes the coffeehouses as “places where active-duty servicemen, veterans and civilian activists could meet to plan demonstrations, publish underground newspapers and work to build the nascent peace movement within the military” and has documented in detail their pivotal role. He writes:

Over the course of six years, the coffeehouse network would play a central role in some of the G.I. movement’s most significant actions. At the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen, Tex., local staff and G.I.s mobilized to support the Fort Hood 43 — a large group of black soldiers who were arrested at a meeting to discuss their refusal to deploy for riot control duty at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Army authorities were caught off guard by the publicity the coffeehouse brought to the case…. When eight black G.I.s, each of them leaders of the group G.I.s United Against the War in Vietnam, were arrested in 1969 for holding an illegal demonstration at Fort Jackson, the UFO coffeehouse served as a local operations center, drumming up funds for lawyers and promoting the “Fort Jackson Eight” story to the national media.

We can revitalize this sort of network if we want to. People might consider reading Parsons’s book Dangerous Grounds if they are looking for lessons on how to organize such a project.

I spoke to Brittany DeBarros, the organizing director of About Face, the post-9/11 veterans group that carries on the legacy of organizations such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War, about how active-duty soldiers should respond to Trump’s mass deportation orders.

“In the coming year, military personnel will face serious moral crossroads under a commander-in-chief who openly mocks the rule of law and Constitution,” she told me. “The idea that a president would unleash the U.S. military on our neighborhoods to round up our hardworking neighbors is disgusting. Troops have a responsibility to refuse illegal orders and a duty to resist immoral ones. It’s in these moments where we have something to lose that we decide what our values really mean to us.”

The idea that a president would unleash the U.S. military on our neighborhoods to round up our hardworking neighbors is disgusting.

Active-duty soldiers must be reminded that migrants fleeing north are escaping political repression and economic devastation, and are simply seeking a better life in a country that has the resources and ability to redistribute them if we choose. Active-duty soldiers need to be reminded that much of the reason these people are fleeing their homes is also because of the U.S. meddling in their countries’ elections, overthrowing democratically elected leaders, and generally pillaging countries below our southern border for their resources.

Active-duty soldiers should also understand that the attempt by the ruling class to demonize those seeking a better life in the U.S. employs an age-old divide-and-conquer tactic that serves only to distract from vast wealth the ruling class steals from the poor and working class.

Immigrants, or those with little to no political power, no military power, no wealth to buy elected officials, aren’t the ones that are stealing from U.S. citizens. It’s the Trumps, Musks and Bezoses who are the ones robbing us. Those who believe the military should be an occupying force in order to attack poor people are those who have taken their eyes off the true enemy of the people: the billionaire ruling class.

In the last five years, the world has faced the perils of COVID-19; a potential nuclear war as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Biden’s dangerous escalation of the conflict; one climate disaster after another; and a live-streamed genocide in Gaza. Now we are faced with another Trump administration.

The impulse to retreat into books, video games, or other forms of escape needs to be understood and respected. It reflects the very real need for a sense of safety that at times requires taking time for ourselves, even during crisis. But ultimately, that safety can’t be assured if we only retreat. As the abolitionists tell us, we keep us safe.

Now is also the time to figure out how to make space to collectively challenge these immoral policies, at a faster pace perhaps than we feel ready for. Collectively we have the power to resist creeping fascism.

As Trump tries to implement policies of mass harm, we all may face unreasonable orders by our bosses, landlords, politicians and police — and we all must be ready to refuse them. The targets of reactionary political decisions may not have an escape.