So It Begins: The Military and Massive Deportation

We have now entered the find out phase of the election--who will be appointed to what positions?

We might be feeling some relief that relatively sane sycophants like Marco Rubio are being named to Secretary of State.  That Kristi Noem is awful, but can she actually manage the Department of Homeland Security.

But on the other side, the truly awful are getting into key positions.  Stephen Miller, who is the most hateful and hated Trump player, will be Deputy Chief of Staff, which means he will be close to Trump all the time.  Tom Homan, who was a key player in family separation under Trump 1.0, is now back.  Listen to him:

incoming Trump "border czar" Tom Homan on Fox Business says he expects the military to be involved in his mass deportation

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 10:07 AM

Which raises the question of what roles the US military might play in massive deportation:

1. Special ops, as Homan suggests, to go after the cartels.  Which means the US is waging war inside of Mexico and perhaps against Mexico.
2. Providing the external cordons of sweeps for those that are being deported.
3. Building the concentration camps and perhaps providing some of the guards for these places until the contracts can be written to provide private prison companies with sweet deals (who will be checking which companies grease which decision-makers?)
4. Repressing protests as people start to realize the scope/scale/cruelty of the deportation.

 The US military will follow lawful but awful orders.  The special ops stuff will not face resistance, I think, as this fits into their skill set and does not deviate from the kind of missions they have done elsewhere.  Plus we have had a shit ton of pop culture tell us that special ops are great for killing drug dealers.  Building concentration camps?  Fencing and pitching tents?  Part of the day job, and won't be seen as problematic until it is too late.  

It really is about 2 and 4.  What is involved with this?  Sending MPs into push protestors around?  Easy to imagine.  Sending in regular troops to confront large groups of protestors?  I have a research assistance looking into the literature on when democratic militaries repress or refuse, so I don't know right now what will happen.  Indeed, no one knows, because it is never clear what will happen when troops are giving orders to fire upon civilians until the decision point is upon us.  

I am fully engaged in doomerism, but pretty much any massive deportation pathway leads to cruelty and death.  Whether it causes a full-scale crisis in American civil-military relations where the military either defies the civilian authorities or engages in large scale repression of the public is not clear.  But the odds are far greater than they should be.  I am waiting to see who is named Attorney General and who is named SecDef, as those are the key appointments that will signal how massive deportation will be conducted and how much the military will be dragged into and torn apart by it.