Trump’s mass deportation promise is based on a dangerous law that is still on the books.
It’s easy to dismiss nativist rhetoric as mere Trumpy “locker room talk.” But when it comes to immigration, deportation, and even detention, rhetoric about foreigners and violent invaders is actually a legal long game. Toward the end of the summer of 2023, Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noticed that right-wing anti-immigration groups and the Trump campaign had started talking in earnest about using a very old law, with a very dark history, in order to do very chilling things to immigrants. By October 2024, Donald Trump was invoking the statute in most of his stump speeches, saying he intends to use it to carry out the mass deportations of non-citizens, without due process and with domestic law enforcement deployed to full effect. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick asks Katherine Yon Ebright to help the rest of us catch up with her deep dive on this dangerous law, and to explain why we should take the threats to use it literally and seriously.
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