President Trump Calls Deportation Efforts A "Military Operation"

FILE - In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, a U.S. Border Patrol agent drives near the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Santa Teresa, N.M. Can Donald Trump really make good on his promise to build a wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border to prevent illegal migration? What’s more, can he make Mexico pay for it? Sure, he can build it, but it’s not nearly as simple as he says. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras)

Wow. Those “bad dudes” are back.

I’m going to talk about this here, because by this evening, everybody is going to be pointing at President Trump again and saying, “FAKE NEWS!”

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“We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country,” he said at a meeting with manufacturing CEOs. “And at a rate nobody has ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones. And it’s a military operation.”

Unless I’ve missed something big, no military personnel have been deployed to round up illegals and shuffle them out of our country.

There have been some new immigration enforcement policies enacted, and we’ve heard quite a bit about some of the sweeps taking place in different communities around the nation. Most of those are just enacting the policies that are already on the book.

The Department of Homeland Security guidelines vastly increase the number of immigrants who are considered priorities for deportation. They also direct law enforcement agencies to hire thousands of new agents to apprehend people living in the country illegally, with local police and sheriffs’ offices enlisted in the effort.

The military, however, is not involved. The guidelines did not adopt a draft plan to enlist National Guard troops to help apprehend undocumented immigrants in nearly a dozen states.

Trump’s camp say the deportations are aimed at rounding up criminal illegals.

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“You see what’s happening at the border,” the president said. “All of the sudden, for the first time, we’re getting gang members out. We’re getting drug lords out.”

“When you see gang violence and you’ve read about it like never before, all of the things, much of that is people who are here illegally. And they’re tough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people,” he continued.

The new policy differs from the Obama policy in that it considers priority for removals to be anyone convicted, charged, or suspected of a crime.

Obama’s policy targeted serious criminals, those who had recently made it across the border, and suspected terrorists.

Along with the new policy, Trump has chosen to keep Obama’s “Dreamers” Act (DACA) to stay in place.

What has not been enacted, however, is a military force for removing illegal immigrants.

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