President-elect Donald Trump will use the US 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 utilise troops to try to remove record numbers of immigrants in the US illegally.
When asked about a US 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 re-election 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 US Border Patrol at the border with Mexico, but they have not been used to make immigration arrests.
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