That is interesting. I’m not sure to what extent he has been able to position personnel and resources before taking office. I can imagine he could rapidly change the attitude of ICE personnel and others currently involved in immigration. But I’m not sure how quickly he could mobilize personnel and resources to take actions such as you suggest.
“Trump promised us bullshit in our shit sandwiches, but those nasty Democrats gave us horseshit instead!”
Trump doesn’t plan out anything, and certainly cannot “position [government] personnel and resources before raking office” beyond the scope of his transition team.
Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does have the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) which arrests, detains, and processes undocumented immigrants or those who have violated serious crimes for deportation, they are mostly focused on drug smuggling, transnational criminal gangs, and counterterrorism. ICE only has a notional staff of 21k employees, a fraction of which are agents (roughly half of which are in Homeland Security Investigations), and is perennially understaffed to the point of struggling to execute even modest-sized raids and is highly dependent on other federal agencies (mostly DEA and the US Marshals Service) plus state level and a patchwork of compliant municipal and county level law enforcement (under federal ‘task force’ mandates) for support. Although this is the ostensible mission of ICE, it is in no way composed to be able to execute large scale immigration and deportation raids, and there is substantial bureaucracy in their process specifically to prevent the agency from being abused in this fashion; all of that would have to be torn out and the agency would have to go on a staffing run to be capable of executing on that level.
Customs and Border Protection (which like ICE is under the Department of Homeland Security) actually has about three times the staff of ICE and while their mission is to interdict and detain undocumented immigrants ‘near’ the border (‘near’ being now interpreted as anywhere within 100 miles within United States borders, and could be made arbitrarily deeper), even they don’t have the staffing and resources to round up tens of thousands of people a week. While the ‘border crisis’ isn’t as vast and dire as Fox News would have you believe (there are no “millions of ‘illegals’ streaming over the border every day”) CBP has been overwhelmed with a volume of migrants numbers of at most a few thousand a day. Even assuming that all due process and restrictions were removed, just the logistics of rounding up and detaining or deporting thousands of undocumented immigrants a day, even with assistance of state and local law enforcement, would overwhelm CBP capabilities.
Nor would the US Army or National Guard, even if activated and federalized under some kind of national emergency order, be of much use because there just aren’t facilities, buses, planes, and all of these supplies necessary to execute on this, nor will Mexico or any other nation agree to take on millions of immigrants in short order. In fact, under Biden’s polices, we’ve been paying a number of countries in Central and South America through which migrants pass on their way to the US southern border to retain and house immigrants in order to reduce pressure on CBP (which has been successful and much cheaper than the cost of deporting them). If that policy goes away (which I’m sure it will because it is way too deep a strategy for Trump) and he directs CBP to go round up masses of people, the result is that there will be less enforcement at the border and it will become more porous.
I’m sure Trump wants to do this, will try to do this, and it seems not unlikely that he’ll declare an imminent national security threat and try to bring military power and resources to bear. But it is just physically impossible for the government to actually execute on this ‘mission’ in short order without a massive reconfiguration and buildup of facilities to support it, which is the kind of planning and organization which requires the bureaucracy that other Trump appointees are going to be actively tearing down. The result is going to be a massive clusterfuck of incompetence and a kind of bumbling ineptitude that makes the Three Stooges look astute, and may actually reduce deportations (which have been at record numbers under Biden). The real point, of course, is to punish, frighten, and harm immigrants, which I’m sure this will accomplish, although it won’t stop people from wanting to come to the US until it is literally worse than the other awful situations and collapsing governments from the countries they are coming from.
Stranger
I agree with all you posted, with one possible addition:
Taking a page from our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wager any efforts taken will have the result of enriching moneyed interests/private industry. No, we likely will not accomplish anything of significant or enduring value, a shit tone of money will be spent, and a lot of folk will likely be hurt in the process. But it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of wealthy folk will become even wealthier as a result.
Oh, for certain. Autocracy and especially fascism (which I think we are rapidly emerging into) is always a lucrative business environment for sufficiently obeisant and profits-above-pride business leaders, and the last quarter of a century has done nothing but encourage that kind of ‘moral flexibility’ in C-suites around the country. For sure, corporations are going to step up and offer to help for a piece of that sweet quisling pie, especially the ones already taking their profits at the expense of middle and lower socioeconomic class Americans. Exploitation has become “The American Way” and that is certainly not going to stop in an underregulated, authoritarian environment, and anybody who thinks that powerful and rich business leaders are going to stand up against despotic excesses only needs to look at the likes of Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon to already see counterexamples of the richest and most powerful genuflecting before even being asked because they see the profit in compliance and the loss in resistance in purely fiscal terms.
And in those terms, they are not wrong: Frederich Flick became one of the most powerful industrialists in post-Weimar Germany by being an early supporter and supplicant of Adolf Hitler, and then after losing ‘everything’ and serving a short sentence as a war criminal for being a collaborator and running businesses which used tens of thousands of internees as slave labor, came back to be the richest man in Germany and run a large multinational corporations controlled by one of the wealthiest families in the world. Smart, amoral, indescribably horrible man who nonetheless came out on top by bending to the winds.
Stranger
They’ve been there all along. The U.S. and Panama have a security partnership that includes training of Panamanian troops. There is also the Naval Support Activity which "provides facilities, security, and operational support to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. It also houses the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Panama City Division, the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center, and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. "
There are no permanent US military bases in the nation of Panama; there are a few detachments from various branches of the US military totally about 6,500 personnel, mostly to perform training or aid in interdiction operations with other governments in Central and South America. The Naval Support Activity you mention is an installation in Panama City, Florida which hosts various pan-service training facilities and a US Coast Guard Station.
To occupy Panama would require sending a major force; in the aptly named 1989 ‘Operation Just Cause’ invasion to depose the formerly US-supported Manuel Noriega and ‘restore democracy’, the United States Department of Defense sent over 20,000 troops in a temporary occupation of government faculties (which did not interfere with or take over operations of the Panama Canal). A permanent occupation of Panama and taking over operations of the extensive Panama Canal and its associated Special Economic Zones would conservatively speaking require five times that number plus people with expertise in maritime operations, economic advisors, et cetera to keep critical canal operations going. It isn’t just knocking down doors and grabbing a few “high value targets”; it would be a major and indefinite commitment of security and operational personnel to take, hold, and use Panama. Not that Donald Trump understands or cares about any of this because he sees the world through the eyes of a narcissistic, terminally spoilt child, unencumbered with knowledge, obligation, or accountability for any of his stupid failures.
Stranger
- Executive order cutting off all aid (financial, military and intelligence) to Ukraine.
- Telling AG Bondi to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate members of the Jan. 6 committee.
- Telling AG Bondi to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Biden “crime family”.
- Instructing FBI Director Patel to investigate and detain as needed political enemies and members of the media.
- He will let Panama know they have 24hours to allow all U.S. ships to pass through the canal without any fees or face a naval blockade that will effectively shut down the canal.
- He will empower ICE to arrest any Governors, Mayors or other officials who obstruct or interfere with deportations or who give sanctuary to immigrants.
I expect most of this to happen in the first 24 hours after he takes office.
And it ultimately wouldn’t do anything to decrease the cost to use the canal, which is Trump’s alleged justification for taking over Panama. Those costs are driven by the realities of the canal having less water than it needs these days, limiting the number of ships that can transit the canal, and thus driving up costs.
So: hard to do, likely to fail, and won’t fix the problem in the first place. Okay, I take back my earlier prediction, THIS might be the first thing he really tries to screw up.
It’ll take a while because whole the US military is a mighty force, it is also cumbersome and has a lot of current commitments, has had a ‘brain drain’ of people experienced in logistics, and can’t get out of its own way in issuing contracts even for designated ‘sole source providers’ regardless of what the president or top brass want to happen. The military could possibly deploy a Marine Expeditionary Force inside of a month but all it could do is grab government functions and key commercial facilities; it couldn’t possibly run the canal lock system or perform any of the activities necessary to keep the canal zone functional, and as you note, no military action is going to fix the drought that is causing the throughput issues. If anything, such action would increase costs and exacerbate the current problems at the Panama Canal. But even if he orders it on January 20th, it would likely be close to mid-year before the military were really in any position to engage in an invasion.
The military could ‘invade’ Greenland tomorrow; there is little in the way of military forces and no organized resistance since there are basically just small settlements and towns in mostly coastal regions that could probably be taken by the landing party one could assemble from the crew of a frigate , but it would take years to extract any useful resources from Greenland. It is such a stupid, pointless notion that it is hard to imagine any adult leader other than Donald Trump from even advocating for it. But again, he sees the world through ‘toddler goggles’ and throws a temper tantrum any time someone tells him how unworkable his ideas are.
Stranger
Radical tariffs on Canada, Executive order to round up + mass deport 10’s of millions of illegal immigrants, prepping the military to invade greenland, etc
If i had to pick one as what i predict the first will be: probably tariffs, on China first, then Canada soon after
I mean… it’s Panama. How much of a fight could they really put up?
Note that tariffs on Canada are in direct violation of NAFTA v.2, aka the USMCA trade agreement, a trade treaty negotiated by the first Trump administration itself. This means that on top of significantly hurting the economies of both nations, it will signal to the world no agreements with the US can be trusted, not even ones Trump has signed himself.
Truly a brilliant bit of foreign policy.
Trump will be turning this guy loose as his border czar and it looks like he will be doing a lot of really nasty things from Day 1.
Thomas Homan “has proposed a hotline for people to report neighbors they suspect are living in the country illegally. He has threatened to arrest state and local leaders who try to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And if ICE officers can’t rely on local help, they will go into communities to find their targets, he has said.”
From the NYT. Gift link.
The first blocks of our crumbling democracy falling. Good luck on 2028 elections - not gonna happen .
“…approximately 27,000 Ministry of Public Security personnel (2023)” in the Panamanian Public Forces the according to the CIA World Factbook, and somewhere around 50,000 part time and reservists (from IISS as of 2012). Not enough to resist a major invasion force or even the aforementioned Marine Expeditionary Force or even a Brigade-sized force, but enough that it would take a significant operation to invade and hold. And again, an invasion force isn’t going to be able to maintain operations of the canal or make them more cost-effective, which of course is the entire justification for doing this in the first place.
Even if they do (I suspect we’ll have elections just because they are run at the state level, and represent some notional continuum with Constitutional governance) they are going to be gerrymandered as fuck in every ‘Red’ state, and possibly results contested at the Congressional level if they are anything but favorable to MAGA ‘conservatives’ (who are anything but conservative in any genuine sense of the term).
It is far from the first “REALLY BAD NEWS” but one thing Trump et al has vowed to do and will for certain follow through with is defunding and dismantling all climate monitoring, modeling, and public communication and education efforts, as well as shutting down any efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change (of which the Department of Defense is one of the biggest participants because while the military isn’t composed of a bunch of tree-huggers the impacts upon national security and defense operations are quite evident to planners who have been looking at these problems since the mid-‘Nineties). As much as anything Trump will do to harm this country, this is the one that has the most significant, long lasting, and devastating impacts, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about most of it except to maintain whatever programs can be supported at state-level government.
Maybe the ‘hopeful skeptics’ will get their magic trick and Trump chokes on a chicken wing while Democrats take over both houses of Congress in a 2026 ‘Blue Tsunami’, and maybe even there is a natural disaster that wipes out several particular members of the Supreme Court and a sane leader wins the presidency in 2028, and nominates fair and impartial candidates for the Court that are embraced in an unexpected wave of bipartisanism. But the loss of programs, lack of preparation, and erosion of knowledge about the effects and status of the climate will be with us indefinitely, curtailing effective measures we might take to mitigate the worst impacts, and emplace systems and empower people to work toward resilience.
Stranger
I’m laughing at myself right now. This is what happens when one works from memories that are 40 years old. When I was in the Navy, I knew troops who were stationed there in support roles. At least there are still some training people there, so I’m not completely embarrassed.
*Heh*, no worries. I have had a few casual coworkers who, for one reason or another, relocated to ‘Panama City’, and for years I wondered what the appeal was to moving to a tiny Latin American country until I had some tangential involvement with one of the schools there and realized it was in Florida.
The US used to have significant forces in the nation of Panama but since the abolition of the Panama Canal Zone in 1979 (and incidentally, the BRAC ‘realignment’ although I don’t think that any bases in Panama were closed as a part of BRAC) we’ve drawn down forces, and there has not been a permanent base in country since 2000 as it isn’t a significant counterterrorism target in the Global War on Terror. I think most of the forces there today are either training counterinsurgency operations, supporting drug interdiction, and logistics to support military operations through the canal and around Central and South America. Aside from some basic security forces I doubt there is as much as a full battalion of ‘fighting forces’ housed there on a regular basis, and most if not all deployments are temporary detached duty (TDY) than any kind of permanent duty station.
Stranger
“I, Donald J Trump, do solemnly swear…”