Immigration groups and Democratic leaders are trying to disrupt President-elect Donald Trump’s plan deport millions of undocumented immigrants by pre-drafting lawsuits that can be filed once he comes to power.
Trump has vowed to carry out what he calls “the largest deportation operation” in the country’s history and has pledged to reinstate and expand his controversial ban on people entering the US from certain Muslim countries as part of his immigration policy.
On Monday, he emphasized again on Truth Social that he is prepared to declare a national emergency use military resources to fulfill his promise of mass deportation.
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Several immigration advocates and Democratic leaders told ABC News they have spent months preparing for the prospect of another Trump presidency and the expected crackdown on immigrants that Trump and his new colleagues have tapped. border czar Tom Homan have promised.
Homan, who has embraced Trump’s pledge to undertake mass deportations on “Day 1” of the new administration, oversaw the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) during the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” enforcement, where parents were separated from their children at the border.
“In California, we have been thinking about the possibility of this day for months and in some cases years, preparing and preparing by looking at all the actions Trump said he would take,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. ABC News.
Bonta said his team has prepared briefs on several immigration issues Trump mentioned during his campaign. including mass deportations, birthright citizenship, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and sanctuary cities.
PHOTO: President-elect Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office of the White House during a meeting with President Joe Biden, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (Evan Vucci/AP)
“There will be pain and harm caused by him. Not all of it can be avoided, but to reach our immigrant communities in ways that are against the law, they will have to go through me, and we will stop them. in courts using our legal tools given to us,” Bonta said.
California’s attorney general claims that 80% of the state’s legal challenges to immigration decisions and policies from Trump’s first term were successful.
“We are confident that we will block major efforts by the federal government, that we will be able to weaken some of the worst efforts,” Bonta said.
The 24 Democratic attorneys general in the United States hope to form a united front to block the Trump administration’s immigration policies by using his first term as a blueprint, said Sean Rankin, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association.
“When we look at immigration, we know this is something the president has talked about over and over again,” Rankin told ABC News. “Right now we’re not connecting the dots. We’re following flashing arrows. It’s very easy to see where they’re going.”
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Among Homan’s targets in his mass deportation plan are sanctuary states and cities — places that have passed laws designed to protect undocumented immigrants. The policy, which varies by state, generally prohibits city officials from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
“They better step aside,” Homan said last week about the governors of sanctuary states. “Either you help us or you get out of our way, because ICE is going to do its job.”
Leaders in several sanctuary cities have said they will fight back using whatever tools are legally available to protect immigrant communities.
“We have done the work in this office to prepare for a lot of different hypotheses and we will be prepared to meet them with all the resources we have,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said last week at a press conference.
Ferguson told reporters that his legal team defeated 55 “illegal actions” and policies by the Trump administration between 2017 and 2021. But while his office has been preparing for lawsuits for months, Ferguson said he believes the second Trump administration will also be better prepared than the first.
PHOTO: In this Oct. 11, 2024, file photo, the border fence is seen from a drone camera between the United States and Mexico in San Luis, Arizona. (The Washington Post via Getty Images, FILE)
“One of the many reasons we were successful with our lawsuits against the Trump administration was that they were often sloppy in the way they were rolled out and that gave us opportunities to prevail,” Ferguson told reporters. “I expect we’ll see less of that in court this time, and that’s an important difference.”
In addition to considering using the military to carry out deportations, Trump and his allies have proposed using an obscure portion of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 — a set of 18th century war laws — to immediately deport some migrants deport without a hearing. .
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told ABC News they are preparing for the possible use of the military to carry out deportations.
“They’re going to try to use the military, under the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily deport people,” Gelernt said. “We will try to challenge it immediately.”
Gelernt, who led the ACLU’s legal response to family separations during Trump’s first term, said he expects the incoming Trump administration will be “worse for immigrants” than the first.
“The Trump team has apparently been preparing to implement anti-immigrant policies for four years, and the rhetoric in the country has become so much more polarized than in 2016,” Gelernt said.
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During Trump’s first term, Gelernt said groups like the ACLU were caught off guard by some of his executive orders, like the travel ban — but this time the organization has been preparing lawsuits for nearly a year. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s controversial travel ban from several predominantly Muslim countries, which the Biden administration later lifted. Since then, Trump has appointed two Supreme Court justices.
“We are identifying our challenges with much more advanced preparation, and we are doing our best to coordinate between all the different NGOs (non-governmental organizations) across the country,” Gelernt said.
“As litigators, we have convened, we have prepared, we have tried to anticipate the unimaginable as we enter the next four years,” said Alina Das, co-director of the New York Times Immigrant Rights Clinic. York University School of Law.
How Democrats plan to fight Trump’s mass deportation plan originally appeared on abcnews.go.com