and Trump's picks for borders are and Homeland Security secretary say they plan to prioritize deporting criminals but the Biden Administration says it's already been doing that let's bring in Leon Rodriguez former director of US citizenship and Immigration Services under President Obama for more on that LE thanks for coming on Trump has repeatedly said that he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to enact his Mass deportations he hasn't revealed many details beyond that though so how would that work how would declaring an emergency enable him to then enact Mass deportations well I
think they going to be a lot of legal questions as to whether and to what extent he can use the military for that purpose and declare a National Emergency uh but I think the idea is to leverage uh resources uh that the military has to to bolster what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security more generally have um we do have to remember back to the experience of the first Trump Administration uh they attempted to use the uh National Guard in fact Governor Chris then Governor chrisy gome uh sent the South Dakota National
Guard uh to uh support uh border control efforts and uh generally that is uh remembered as uh a sort of a non- entity in in the sense that uh there really was not much that troops not trained in border control not trained in immig migration enforcement really could do to bolster those efforts and so the question is how is this time going to be different now the mass deportation plan as you say right you're expecting it to face a lot of opposition in court how do you see those legal battles playing out well I think
th those uh legal travel uh uh challenges will look at what what is the authority to declare a National Emergency what are the circumstances uh that support such a declaration uh and and to then question in court whether those standards have actually met uh been met uh given the way we've been managing uh the Border managing immigration really now uh for decades but then there's another layer to this which is the legal challenges for the actual uh Machinery of deportation uh each individual who is put into deportation proceedings has a has due process rights uh
that they dedly will be asserting that attorneys will be asserting on their behalf uh in fact I I know that uh immigration lawyers and others willing to work pro bono are mobilizing uh to uh resist uh those deportation efforts when they begin and I do think they will begin and Trump also says he plans to end temporary protected status for millions of legal immigrants so break down who falls under that protection and the potential impact of ending it so a temporary protected status uh protects individuals uh For Whom the Department of Homeland Security has declared
uh uh some catastrophic or extraordinary circumstance uh in their country uh which uh makes uh Nationals of those countries unable to return uh and therefore uh grants those individuals uh permission to remain in the United States and work authorization uh and in countries that have had those declarations include Venezuela uh El Salvador Honduras uh Nicaragua and uh in fact there Haiti is another one uh in fact there were efforts during the first Trump Administration um almost all of which uh were successfully uh stopped in court uh to remove those temporary protected status grants and and
the resulting uh work authorization but given the uh inclusion of Venezuela now which was not a factor in the first uh Trump Administration we are really talking about many hundreds of thousands of people uh who currently have the authority to be legally in the United States who may lose it uh if uh the incoming Administration is successful in in implementing uh those terminations of temporary protected status so what's your response to critics who say that that temporary protected status has become a back door essentially for immigration from lots of these countries and and it's not
been so temporary I mean I think that really uh reflects uh the conditions in those countries those are uh countries that have experienced either uh War severe uh severe uh natural disasters uh the impact of which uh remains to this day so in essence the the conditions that supported the implementation of temporary protect status uh continues until now so under the law um the the department of homeland security has in my mind been justified in continuing those temporary protected status grants I mean Venezuela is is a certainly a good uh Mo most recent example uh
it's Undisputed that this is a a country that is uh in in Breakdown uh in a number of respects all right former citizenship and Immigration Services director Leon Rodriguez we appreciate it Leon thank you
