But the president and several others in his inner circle — most notably Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Trump in his first term, and now Trump's right hand man on immigration — have long talked about using the National Guard to help with mass deportations and immigration raids, despite U.S. laws broadly preventing the military from being used for domestic policing. To get around those laws, both Trump and Miller have talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the military within the U.S. in certain situations.
Much of Trump's campaign ahead of the 2024 election was focused on drumming up anti-immigrant sentiment and pushing his plan for mass deportations. He vowed several times on the campaign trail that he would launch the largest deportation operation in American history.
In his first term, Trump and his administration had similar ambitions, but struggled to scale up infrastructure and manpower needed to carry out the goal.
Using the National Guard for immigration enforcement is an idea that Miller had talked about publicly in the years before.
In 2023, Miller appeared on the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's podcast to talk about how mass deportations under Trump's hopeful second term could work.
"In terms of personnel, you go to the red state governors, and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers," Miller explained. "The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama, and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia."
Miller doesn't specify how that would be legal — under U.S. law, the military can't be used for domestic policing unless authorized by the Constitution or Congress. For Democratic-run states that don't comply, Miller said, the federal government would simply send the National Guard from a nearby Republican-run state.
"Trump was deeply deferential to Stephen and I think you've seen that with a vastly more empowered Stephen Miller in a second term," says Taylor, an author and commentator.
Taylor says that during Trump's first term, the president wasn't talking publicly about using the U.S. military for immigration enforcement, but it was something that was discussed behind closed doors.
It wasn't something that Trump just talked about. In 2017, The Associated Press reported on a memo it obtained from DHS, outlining a draft proposal to use the National Guard to round up unauthorized immigrants throughout the U.S. At the time, the White House denied it, saying there was no such plan.
Taylor says there very much was — but it was also more than that.
"It was the invocation of the Insurrection Act to deputize the military to enforce domestic law to basically become a domestic police force," he says, noting that this particular idea was something that troubled him and several other staffers.
"It rocked us to our core," he says.
Trump invoking the Insurrection Act would legally allow for the military to act as police on U.S. soil — to carry out immigration enforcement, but possibly other enforcement too, according to legal experts.
The broader themes of these National Guard deployments are also embedded in Project 2025, a conservative action plan written by the Heritage Foundation after Trump's first term that's more than 900 pages long.
"The subtext of Project 2025 is to take any and all steps at the executive level to go into cities and states to enact the priority — which is to root out illegal immigration," Dallek says.
The idea of bullying states and cities into following orders from the president is a key part of the text, says David Graham, a journalist for The Atlantic who also wrote a book on the project. So is the use of the military.
In recent weeks, Trump has talked about invoking the Insurrection Act often, especially in regard to deploying the National Guard. Earlier this month, he said that he was "allowed" to invoke it if the courts deny his deployments in places like Portland, Ore., or Chicago, where prosecutors and federal judges have questioned the need for troops on the ground.
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigration rights advocacy group, says it has her worried about the upcoming 2026 midterm elections and what the presence of troops might mean for voters as they cast ballots.
"What I have said repeatedly is that the path to authoritarianism in this country is being built on the backs of immigrants. They will begin with immigrants. They will not end with immigrants," she says.
Even just from a perspective of Trump being a petty vindictive shit heel, obviously this would be mostly targeted at Democratic-led cities that never voted for him. Combined with the fact that that's where a lot of the immigrants he wants to deport are going to be found anyway (being the major population hubs for their respective states and all).