This occurred to me while I was awake in the wee hours. Suppose Trump follows through with his intention to send military troops into major cities to round up aliens, and a state governor takes exception to this and calls out the NG to defend his cities (as is his right). I’m guessing this would be an unwanted and potentially tragic confrontation.
As a retired military guy, I don’t believe that I could have ever taken up arms against another uniformed American, and would have refused the order to do so. I suspect that a lot of others would have the same reaction. But the possibility of such an encounter is a very real scenario in my opinion, given our impending DOTUS.
I don’t believe it would be a lawful order. I thought we still had a firewall in place against using the US Army domestically?
But if he succeeded in getting the other branches of Government to allow this, I still wonder if the Generals would go along with this.
No way would I take up arms, but I managed to get through the Navy without firing a gun. So, probably the wrong person to ask.
More on the legality:
Overall, it would be an illegal order to send military troops into major cities to round up aliens. He would have to couch it as putting down an insurrection basically.
Being duty-bound and being willing to disobey the CinC can be a real dilemma. Trump has sworn to court martial officers that don’t do what he tells them to. Even if acquitted, that action is still part of your record and good luck on future promotions.
The Insurrection Act is law. If Trump declares an insurrection, then he can use the military to quell it. It’s no small matter to refuse an executive order. We were always told that we had a duty to refuse to follow an unlawful order, but there was always a very large BUT attached to that, as in “BUT you’d better be sure that you’re right before you decide to do that.”
I don’t think you’d have to look very hard to find military personnel willing to do whatever Trump wants them to do. I think polls even suggest a commanding majority of them would.
That statement was made with a large dollop of context that unlawful orders would the 0.000001% exception to the general rule of receiving only lawful orders.
In a world where there’s a continuous stream of unlawful orders flowing down from above, a very different reality will take hold real quickly.
It’s true, it would be a huge reach to declare that any arbitrary number of undocumented people constitute an insurrection.
It would be considerably less of a reach to argue that the American officials harboring said people are defying federal law and thus are in rebellion against the government, and to justify lawful action against an insurrection on those grounds.
This is not an insurmountable legal problem, is what I’m saying.
Quite possible. The thread has drifted a bit, which I don’t mind. My hypothetical is “would the Army actually open fire on American citizens (or other military personnel) if there was resistance?”
8 years ago I’d have said absolutely not. The US military is an extremely strong institution, where their role in society and civics are taken very seriously. Officers are extensively taught about the role of the military versus civilian leadership, how militaries in other parts of the world are corrupt and unduly influence or directly rule their country, etc. There are also a lot of emphasis on what orders are legal and illegal and the duty to the law and to refuse legal orders. I would say that the US military is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, militaries in the world when it comes to sticking to their role in civil society.
However, Trump got a crack at appointing a lot of officers and has stacked them with cronies over the years. A lot of that institutional integrity has been weakened. I think we’re still at a point where our military would refuse to fire on national guard units or civilians, but who knows where we’ll be in a few months or years with civil unrest and further radicalization of his cult? It would depend a lot on the circumstances, but I could see schisms that would lead to military vs military violence and potentially overt civil war.
So did the President. You want to stand on that oath?
I fully expect initial deployments will be on the basis of “national security” to defend the nation from “invasion” and “infiltration” by “hostile” foreign “aliens.”
In actual practice, President has basically no involvement in the appointment or promotion of military officers, except possible members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Combatant Commanders (and those appointments typically only last 3 or 4 years, meaning that everyone he might have personally had a hand in appointing to a position would have moved on by now, and in most cases probably retired). Although I wouldn’t be shocked if that norm also went out the window and he started personally vetting (or assigning a roadie to vet) graduates of the various commissioning programs according to some sort of Project 2025 rubric in the next few years.
Yeah, well, the road to Republican hell is paved with “basically”. Their official position on immigration is that it’s “basically an invasion”.
On paper. In reality they’re a bunch of pliable middle managers who fought for their rank and benefits, and aren’t gonna rock the boat to jeopardize that. The lower the rank the more easily they’re pushed and replaced; the higher the rank the more they have to lose.
Officers who refuse unlawful orders might be praised by some of the public. But more likely they’ll just be hounded and possibly lynched by MAGAs.