The New Yorker:

The President is recasting migration as a form of “invasion,” broadening his already expansive powers and making anyone in the U.S. who’s undocumented a potential target.

By Jonathan Blitzer

In the months before the election, Donald Trump’s allies and advisers repeatedly claimed that, if he won a second term, his first day in office would immediately overwhelm the efforts of any organized opposition. “The A.C.L.U. won’t know where to sue first,” one of them told me. Within twenty-four hours of Trump’s Inauguration, twenty-two states, two cities, and a group of nonprofits, including the A.C.L.U., filed lawsuits to block one of a dozen immigration-related executive orders that Trump signed on Monday. The order, called “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” would not only end birthright citizenship, which has been enshrined in U.S. law for more than a century; it would also deny the “privilege of United States citizenship” to the children of parents who lived in the country legally but didn’t have green cards or citizenship status themselves. At a press briefing organized by the Federalist Society, John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose maximalist view of executive power was the basis for the Bush Administration’s use of torture during the war on terror, said, “This one, I think, is the most legally tenuous, and it’s going to invite a huge fight that could tie up the Administration in knots.” On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Still, as legal analysts and immigration experts scrambled to parse the language of the new orders, they had little choice but to triage on a Trumpian continuum, where, in many cases, actions that would have seemed unfathomable just years or even months before were now regarded as essentially normal. Others were more obviously alarming. Under an order called “Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States,” the Department of Defense might not simply assist federal immigration authorities to provide provisional detention space for migrants or to conduct logistical tasks at the border, as it has in the past. Instead, the President was now calling on active-duty troops to carry out a “mission to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.” Specifically, the order calls for a new Unified Command Plan to be drawn up within ten days. “That potentially takes things to another level,” Elizabeth Goitein, a national-security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “This at least seems to contemplate military operations at the border. It’s completely unexpected and pretty outrageous.”

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