The Daily Caller spoke to multiple senior Administration officials who said President Trump is planning to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to remove illegal aliens from the United States. The Act was last used by President George H.W. Bush to control the 1992 Los Angeles riots. President Dwight Eisenhower also used the Act in 1957 to desegregate schools in the south.
The series of statutes that make up the Insurrection Act date back to the nation’s founding. It says, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”
This means, according University of Texas Law Professor Stephen Vladeck, that “if the president determines that ordinary law enforcement is inadequate to enforce federal law, he can deploy the military to assist. And although Congress in the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibited use of the federal military for domestic law enforcement, the Insurrection Act was always understood as the principal exception to that general rule.”
The Act has never been used to deal with an immigration matter so invoking it will produce legal challenges. However, “the text of the statute would seem to be on the president’s side,” Vladeck said, “underscoring just how broad the power is that Congress has delegated to the president.
The Daily Caller reports the president is also considering declaring that the country is incapable of accepting additional asylum seekers. One source told The Caller, “If you take a ship and it holds 1,000 people maximum — one more person and the ship is going to collapse. The country is full. Our hospitals are full, our detention centers are full.”
Until the president invokes the Insurrection Act, or Congress removes the loopholes driving asylum seekers, ICE will continue to release illegal aliens into the interior. Overcrowded detention facilities forced ICE to release 100,000 illegal aliens just between January and March of 2019. Some are now being flown to certain cities and dropped off at shelters. The Administration plans to hire a contractor to ramp up that effort nationwide.
Read more in The Daily Caller.
