By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON - President-elect Donald Trump will use the U.S. military to the fullest extent of the law to support his mass deportation effort, he told TIME magazine in an interview published on Thursday, committing to his plan to utilize troops to try to remove record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
When asked about a U.S. law that generally prevents the military from being used in domestic law enforcement, Trump said illegal immigration amounted to an invasion that needed to be stopped.
"I consider it an invasion of our country," Trump told TIME as part of an interview naming him 'Person of the Year.' "We'll get National Guard, and we'll go as far as I'm allowed to go, according to the laws of our country."
Trump, a Republican, won reelection in November portraying migrants as dangerous criminals and promising a wide-ranging crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration, including mass deportations. He plans to pull resources from across the federal government for the deportation effort and declare a national emergency to unlock funds for enforcement, Reuters reported in November.
Both Republican and Democratic administration have used National Guard troops to assist the U.S. Border Patrol at the border with Mexico, but they have not been used to make immigration arrests.
The Trump administration plans to use the military in a similar support role for the deportation effort, Trump's incoming border czar Tom Homan told Fox News on Sunday.
"We would like [the Department of Defense] to help us in a lot of areas, in transportation and infrastructure building, intelligence and targeting," Homan said. "But a sworn immigration officer with immigration authority will be making those arrests."
Trump did not rule out building new detention facilities to house immigrants awaiting deportation but said his administration would aim to deport them quickly, limiting the need for camps or other sites.
"I don't want them sitting in camp for the next 20 years. I want them out, and the countries have got to take them back," Trump said.
Trump said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that he aims to deport all immigrants in the U.S. illegally during his four-year term, a massive undertaking that would affect millions of families and damage businesses reliant on those workers, including agriculture.
There were an estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally in January 2022, according to a Department of Homeland Security report, a figure that has likely risen in recent years.
The pro-immigration American Immigration Council found the cost of removing all immigrants without legal status would cost nearly a trillion dollars over more than a decade.
Trump struggled to increase deportations during his 2017-2021 term in office. When counting immigrants deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and those more informally returned to Mexico by U.S. border authorities, President Joe Biden deported more in 2023 than any Trump year.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday found Americans attitudes toward immigrants in the U.S. illegally had hardened slightly since the start of Trump's first-term in 2017.