Patrick Martin
Fascist president-elect Donald Trump has named loyalists strongly identified with the persecution of immigrants and plans for military confrontation with China to leading positions in his administration, indicating the broad contours of the policy that the US government will pursue as soon as he returns to the White House next January.
For the top foreign policy position, Secretary of State, Trump will nominate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, it was reported Monday night. Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, is a ferocious anti-communist and advocate of confrontational policies against China, Cuba, Iran and other targets of American imperialism. He has also been a supporter of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, although Trump himself has boasted he will end that war as soon as he takes office.
CNN and the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Trump has asked Florida Republican Congressman Mike Waltz to become his national security adviser. Waltz is a serving Army colonel, former Green Beret, veteran of special operations in Afghanistan and other countries. He is an anti-China hawk who is expected to spearhead an even more confrontational and belligerent policy towards Beijing than that pursued by the Biden-Harris administration.
Waltz replaced Ron DeSantis as the representative from Florida’s sixth Congressional District, which includes Daytona Beach, in 2018, when DeSantis gave up the seat to run for governor of the state. He defeated Democrat Nancy Soderberg, a career State Department official, in the general election, and has been reelected three times. His congressional career has been entirely bound up with the planning and funding of US imperialist provocations overseas, as he served on the House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.
Earlier Monday, Trump announced via social media that he was nominating Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to be US Ambassador to the United Nations, considered the third-highest foreign policy position. Stefanik is a former White House aide in the George W. Bush administration, identified with rabid support for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
A supposedly moderate Republican, she worked as a congressional aide and then for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, before winning a safe Republican seat in the northernmost portion of New York state, a largely rural area that includes the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain.
In Congress, she moved steadily to the right, embracing the Trump campaign in 2016, then replacing Liz Cheney as the Republican caucus chair, the number three position in leadership, when Cheney publicly denounced Trump and supported his impeachment after the attempted coup of January 6, 2021. Most recently, Stefanik spearheaded the witch-hunt of college students protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza and helped force the resignation of several university presidents for their failure to crack down sufficiently on supposed “antisemitism.”
In domestic policy, Trump signaled that his number one priority will be the use of mass repression and police violence against immigrants by appointing two of his most odious loyalists to launch the police-state effort.
Stephen Miller, the fascist ideologue responsible for the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their families during Trump’s first term, will be deputy White House chief of staff for policy, a position that will put him in charge not only of immigration but of virtually all domestic policy.
While Miller will drive the setting of policy, the actual round-up and mass deportation will be the responsibility of Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration. Trump has confirmed on social media he would name Homan as “border czar,” responsible for stepping up military-police repression both at the US-Mexico border and more generally “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
Trump has threatened to invoke a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, claiming it gives him the authority to deport anyone from a country which is engaged in an “invasion or predatory incursion” into the United States. He would apply this definition to the home countries of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, which includes virtually all of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Miller has suggested that to enforce Trump’s orders, National Guard units from Republican-controlled states like Texas, Florida or Tennessee could be sent into states with Democratic governors, like New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Homan told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” last month the US government would resume large-scale raids on worksites to arrest undocumented workers by the dozens and even hundreds. Such raids were a feature of the first Trump administration but largely abandoned during the Biden administration.
A former Border Patrol agent and special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor of ICE, Homan claimed there would not be “concentration camps” for migrants detained in mass round-ups, but did not explain how they could be detained otherwise. In response to a question whether mass deportations could be carried out without separating immigrant parents from American citizen children born in the United States, Homan said, “families could be deported together.”
Trump’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News that Trump’s “day one agenda” could include revoking Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti, Central America and other countries, which could be done by executive order and does not require legislation. This would affect long-settled migrants like the Haitian factory and service workers living in Springfield, Ohio, who were witch-hunted by Trump and his running mate JD Vance with bogus claims that they were eating pet cats and dogs.
Homan said that the mass deportation campaign would initially target 1.3 million “criminal” immigrants. This term does not refer to migrants who have actually committed crimes, but to the 1.3 million who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court. Most of these immigrants are living and working without incident, let alone hurting anyone, but evading arrest and deportation.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “As a first step, Trump’s advisers are discussing issuing a national emergency declaration at the border on his first day in office, which his team thinks would allow him to move money from the Pentagon to pay for wall construction and to assist with immigrant detention and deportation. But the legality of such a move is unclear. A national emergency, Trump’s advisers think, also would unlock the ability to use military bases for immigrant detention and military planes to help carry out deportations.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Republican-Louisiana) said in a letter circulated to Republican lawmakers this week that the top priority for the next Congress would be passage of legislation that would “surge resources to the southern border to build the Trump Border Wall, acquire new detection technologies, bolster our Border Patrol, and stop the flow of illegal immigration.” This bill would be introduced through the “reconciliation” process which requires only a simple majority in the Senate.
The Republicans have not yet secured a majority in the House of Representatives, holding a lead of 214-204 over the Democrats, with 17 seats still undecided. With 218 required for a majority, and Republicans currently leading in nine of the undecided seats, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that there will a narrow Republican majority, roughly the same as the 222-213 majority before the November 5 election.
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