Stephen Miller calls for the military to deport undocumented immigrants under future Trump administration
The former Trump advisor also repeatedly advocated for the construction of massive facilities to hold immigrants prior to deportation
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
Citation From the September 27, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Talk about how and why the states need to step up and take this into their own hands, and tell the federal government to get out of the way.
STEPHEN MILLER (FORMER TRUMP ADVISOR): Yeah, so, I'll be blunt in saying that, if Texas were to act unilaterally to repel the invasion, it would be -- the action that would be required would be of a scope and scale beyond what I think many people realize or appreciate. Because what you'd really be talking about having to do is switching from a blocking strategy, which is what they're doing right now – you know, put up some razor wire here, put a show of force over there, put cars and trucks where applicable, make trespassing arrests, and so forth – to a detain and remove strategy.
But because of the logistical challenges involved in removing, you would need to build – which I would of course support doing – you would need to build an extremely large holding area for illegal immigrants that at any given points in time, you know, could hold upwards of 50, 60, 70 thousand illegal aliens while you are waiting to send them someplace, somewhere that would be willing to accept them.
Later in the interview, Miller again called for mass detention and for the military to be involved in large-scale deportation efforts.
Citation From the September 27, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Stephen, when Trump is president again as the 47th President of the United States, how do we deport 30 million people?
STEPHEN MILLER (FORMER TRUMP ADVISOR): Well, your first priority for deportation needs to be to send a message to the world, and for many other reasons, needs to be all of the illegal aliens who entered the country under Joe Biden.
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In order to carry out a deportation operation of that scale, you would need to involve the U.S. military, which is why President Trump often talks about the Eisenhower model, when the last time the U.S. military was involved in a large-scale deportation operation. That's also why Trump has talked about invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
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And then you need to mobilize the U.S. military, state, federal, and local law enforcement to then carry out large-scale deportations across the whole country. And then you would need to build very large staging facilities to carry out the removals. Because, you know, logistically, what a lot of people don't think about or realize, is that if a deportation team goes to a particular house and arrests an illegal alien family – so, say, a mother, a father, and four children, there's not just a plane on a tarmac that's ten minutes away ready to take them. And even if there was, it wouldn't be very efficient use of resources, right, to have an entire chartered aircraft for a single-family unit.
So you need to then build massive staging facilities so that you can efficiently remove people a planeful at a time, or when applicable, a busload, if it's going to go back to Mexico, at a time. And so it would be an undertaking that would be greater than any national infrastructure project we've done to date, but that's what we have to do.