Nevitt advises Senate against using military for deportations
This week, Associate Professor Mark Nevitt provided a written statement for the record for a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that weighed the impact of using military personnel to enforce federal immigration laws.
Five witnesses testified during the two-hour December 10 hearing titled, “How Mass Deportations Will Separate American Families, Harm Our Armed Forces, and Devastate Our Economy.” The committee also requested a written statement from Nevitt, an expert on domestic use of the military.
Nevitt is a former Navy aviator and Judge Advocate General’s Corps attorney. He advised strongly against employing service personnel and military assets to deport undocumented immigrants, as President-elect Donald Trump has suggested.
While the Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy armed forces domestically, it is a fairly rare occurrence, invoked only 30 times in 230 years, typically used for a limited time and in a specific geographic area. The Act was invoked most recently in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots.
There are many good reasons it’s rare, Nevitt writes. Troops and police operate under different rules of engagement and communicate differently. The same terminology can mean vastly different things to a police officer versus a soldier.
“Deploying the military to enforce federal immigration laws would require a sharp shift in mindset from overseas warfighter to domestic law enforcer,” Nevitt writes.
“A nationwide law enforcement mission that deploys the military domestically would mark an extraordinary shift in how the nation has used our most cherished national security asset,” Nevitt writes. “It would upset civil-military relations, threaten civil liberties, and endanger lives.”