Top Trump administration officials and the president himself insist the executive branch must have the power to deport illegal immigrants without minimal due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act because it’s the only practical way to carry out mass deportations.

The alternative to such sweeping power, White House adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News earlier this month, is that “every single invader that Joe Biden let in should get their own individual judicial trial before they’re deported … each one gets a million-dollar trial in front of a communist judge to decide whether or not we can send them home.

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Trump himself wrote earlier this week in response to a Supreme Court order temporarily halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act: “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”

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[C]ontrary to the claims of Miller, Vance, and Trump—nothing supports the notion that illegal immigrants are entitled to million-dollar jury trials that would take centuries to carry out.

The entire budget for the immigration court system was $840 million in 2024. If all illegal immigrants were given million-dollar trials as Miller claims, that budget would allow for the deportation of 840 people. The actual number of deportations carried out by the Department of Homeland Security in 2024 totaled more than 271,000 people. “The idea that it is going to cost a million dollars per case is just Stephen Miller being a propagandist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of American Immigration Council, an organization that advocates on behalf of immigrants, told The Dispatch.

John McCormack, An Absurd Rationale for Provoking a Constitutional Crisis - John McCormack