The Pentagon is reportedly holding secret meetings to disrupt Donald Trump‘s mass deportation plans.
The president-elect has vowed to begin deporting 18 million undocumented migrants and close the Mexico border on his first day in office.
Trump appointed Tom Homan, the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as his border czar. Homan said no undocumented migrant would be exempt from the deportation order.
Homan added that Trump’s administration will focus on deporting the “worst of the worst” offenders first.
“People say, well, it sounds awful cruel, you want to remove millions. Let me say this. You have a historic illegal immigration crisis where you have numbers we’ve never seen before, in the millions and millions, of illegal aliens released in this country (and) we know the vast majority will not get asylum, so they don’t qualify.”
However, the Pentagon is questioning Trump’s potential use of the Army to round up illegals and send them back to their home country.
Pentagon officials say such an order would be “unlawful”.
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said one defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
Trump plans to clean house at the Pentagon, Department of Justice and the FBI during his second term in office.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday, “I totally believe that our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. I also believe that our Congress will continue to do the right things to support our military.”
Several former senior military officials who served under Trump in 2016-2020 have sounded the alarm about his authoritarian impulses.
Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff. Kelly said before the election that Trump fits “into the general definition of fascist” and that he spoke fondly of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals.
