Donald Trump Wants to Suspend the Constitution to Tear Apart American Families

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 gives the president wartime authority to detain people from an enemy nation. The law lets the president target immigrants without due process — not even a hearing — based only on their country of origin.

Detaining people without due process creates an obvious constitutional crisis. It runs directly counter to the Fifth Amendment. However, the Supreme Court has already granted presidents immunity to do as they please, so Donald Trump would be free to go after whomever he deems an enemy.

This means that should Donald Trump attempt to use the Act to target certain populations, he could detain them and put them in camps regardless of their U.S. immigration status. It is almost certain that legal immigrants and American citizens would be swept up in the dragnet.

Over 80 percent of those who reside in the U.S. without documentation arrived before 2010. The average undocumented person has lived here for over 16 years. Because of this, most immigrants are well-integrated into their communities. Between one in 20 and one in 25 Americans lives in a mixed-status household — one in which a parent or grandparent is undocumented but the rest of the family are American citizens.

This creates a challenge for an authoritarian leader bent on revenge: how to find and detain the right people. Unless an undocumented immigrant comes into contact with local police, it is very difficult to know where they live.

The Alien Enemies Act is an archaic law that could be used to infringe on people’s constitutional rights—which might explain why Trump is a fan. – Vanity Fair

Raids will be necessary. Donald Trump has promised to send the National Guard and even the military into communities to root out his enemies. Armed police will have to go door-to-door, and they will inevitably take parents from children or spouses from each other. They will make mistakes, and they will detain American citizens and legal immigrants.

And what happens when a state or local government refuses entry to another state’s National Guard or tries to block the U.S. military? Is there fighting — do we risk civil war?

It may seem hyperbolic, but this is what mass deportation looks like. Police or even troops in the streets. Detention camps. The government spending trillions of dollars to tear American families apart — money that could be used to shore up social programs, provide healthcare, or create jobs through infrastructure spending. No one is better off in this scenario.

It is clear that the cruelty is the point, and a disturbing number of Americans cheer this move. But giving an increasingly violent, unstable man the power to use the military to take mothers and fathers away from American families is a risk we cannot afford to take.