A MAGA-supporting group of private military contractors pitched an idea to President Donald Trump to use a “small” civilian army to carry out his mass deportation promises, Politico reported Tuesday.
The contractors, led by Blackwater CEO and Trump acolyte Erik Prince and its former chief operating officer Bill Mathews, proposed a slew of dystopian-level ideas, including carrying out deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases and a private fleet of 100 planes.
According to Politico, which obtained a copy of the 26-page report, the president’s advisers received the unsolicited proposal before his January inauguration. It carries a hefty price tag of $25 billion but promises that, if enacted, would assist in the deportation of 12 million people before the 2026 midterms.
Blackwater founder Erik Prince
To reach its goal, the authors of the plans, who called themselves 2USV, projected that the government would need to “eject nearly 500,000” undocumented immigrants per month.
“To keep pace with the Trump deportations, it would require a 600% increase in activity,” the proposal said, adding that the White House should “enlist outside assistance” to address this suggested rise in demand by deputizing 10,000 private citizens to assist immigration enforcement officers.
These “private citizens,” the plan said, would include former Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers, law enforcement agents, and military veterans, who would work under the supervision of Trump’s deranged “border czar” Tom Homan.
Aside from Prince and Mathews, other key members of the 2USV group include former immigration officials and some people associated with Blackwater, a private military contractor founded by Prince in 1997 that gained widespread notoriety for its role in providing security services during the Iraq War.
That said, the company has been implicated in many violent incidents, including the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre, where four Blackwater personnel were convicted of killing 17 Iraqi civilians, including two children, in Baghdad. The affected employees were later pardoned by Trump toward the end of his first term.
Though it wasn’t clear whether the president had read the plan, the Trump administration has since announced plans to use military sites across the nation to detain undocumented immigrants. (Politico noted that this could merely be a coincidence and that there’s no evidence that the president’s team got this idea from Prince’s group.)
Despite the announcement of some disturbing plans to curb the flow of immigration, Trump’s administration is still falling short of the president’s expectations for mass deportations. The president’s team began arresting and deporting people immediately after he was sworn into office on Jan. 20, but the pace has since slowed. One estimate from Axios, released earlier this month, said that Trump’s arrest rate is behind that of former President Joe Biden, a statistic which is reportedly driving the president “nuts.”
Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told Politico that 2USV’s plan is one of many unsought proposals that the administration has received.
Desai added, though, that the president and his team “remains aligned on and committed to a whole-of-government approach to securing our borders, mass deporting criminal illegal migrants, and enforcing our immigration laws.”
Still, it’s not clear the 2USV plan is being looked at as a possible solution to this. When reached for comment, Mathews told Politico that the group had not been contacted by, nor had discussions with, anyone in the federal government since submitting their proposal.
“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he said.
It’s possible Trump’s administration isn’t paying close attention to the group’s plan because they already have their own nightmarish ideas for detaining undocumented migrants, despite its plans to conduct raids in places of worship getting temporarily barred. And on Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge blocked Trump’s attempt to halt the nation’s refugee admissions system.
Then again, Trump might be avoiding 2USV’s proposal because it’s legally dubious. Some of the recommendations that are likely to face legal hurdles include one to create a screening team of 2,000 attorneys and paralegals to refer people to mass deportation hearings and another to publish a public database of people summoned to appear before an immigration judge. But the push to empower private citizens to impose Trump’s promises regarding deportations might be the most egregious one of all.
“I don’t see how you could do private sector, deputized law enforcement officers,” former ICE director John Sandweg told Politico. “That’s subject to an immediate injunction by a court.”
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