Gov. Ron DeSantis is cooking up something pretty interesting over in Florida where it comes to the Trump administration’s effort to drain out some large percentage of the 20-million-plus illegal aliens currently residing in our country…
#BREAKING: Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida’s official plans submitted to President Donald Trump to further assist mass deportations… turning Florida National Guardsmen into immigration judges and more…
– Let JAGs in the Florida National Guard serve as IMMIGRATION… pic.twitter.com/5SppaA2epO
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 6, 2025
The X post above follows a link to Florida Voice News…
Under an immigration enforcement operations proposal submitted to President Donald Trump’s administration, Florida National Guard officers could serve as immigration judges, helping swiften the process of deportations. The plans, reviewed by Florida’s Voice, state that Judge Advocate General’s Corps officers, also known as JAGs, are “suitable for training as immigration judges.” The state says they have nine of them. Immigration judges are not members of the judicial system, but serve under the executive branch and oversee cases deciding the removal of aliens. The plans say that the federal government could activate these National Guard members to serve as immigration judges. “JAGs could not support in State Active Duty under the command of the Governor and would be directed/stationed at the needs of the federal government,” they state. The proposal comes as Florida law enforcement – both state and local – have entered into 287(g) agreements with the federal government, allowing local officers to apprehend and detain illegal aliens for deportation. The plans also say that the state is ready, via the Florida Division of Emergency Management headed by Kevin Guthrie, to supply personnel to “assist with purchasing commercial flights for eligible individuals, limited to those that do not have a criminal record,” for self-deportation. Florida says it is ready to utilize its vendors to transport “small to large quantities of individuals” and can also “fly from Florida to a detention center or their nation of origin.” “FDEM is authorized to facilitate the transport of undocumented aliens, consistent with federal law,” the plans say. “However, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must specifically request assistance and must reimburse the State for actual costs.” The plans go into further specifics, including specific detention center sites. The state also said it stands ready to rapidly set up facilities to hold 10,000 illegal aliens.
There’s a lot of meat on this bone. Take the JAG officers from state National Guards and turn them into immigration judges presiding over the cases of illegal aliens brought in for deportation, and you solve this imaginary problem of due process the Left is attempting to use as a means of slowing down the mass deportation program Trump was elected on and that the public is strongly in favor of.
The Left will scream that these are sham trials and drumhead proceedings, but that isn’t a very good legal argument.
There isn’t some universal threshold for “due process.” If you’re trying to execute a murderer, for example, there’s a whole lot more process due than if you’re issuing traffic tickets.
And perhaps the least amount of due process applies in the case of someone who (1) came here illegally and then (2) committed crimes while here. Let’s remember that right now it’s people fitting both of those categories who are the vast majority of those the Trump administration is actively attempting to deport.
Again, we’re having endless court fights over illegal alien criminals.
The Left doesn’t care. There isn’t any good faith in any of their arguments. They know that there is zero legal reasoning behind trying to fight the deportation of someone like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who came here illegally as a member of MS-13 and has the tattoos to prove it and proceeded to have no less than SEVENTEEN judicial interactions between 2010 and the time he was finally sent back home to El Salvador earlier this year. You’d look at the hue and cry Democrats raised over Garcia and you’d conclude they’ve lost their minds.
But they haven’t.
Fighting to the last illegal even when the arguments are completely spurious and without merit whatsoever is a strategy. It’s meant to wear down the public with respect to the deportation fight so that when the people being deported aren’t criminals but rather garden-variety illegals who are essentially indentured servants to the cartels who brought them across the border, the public will lose our appetite for those deportations and then listen to the Democrats’ calls for amnesty for them.
Which then results in some fraction of 20 million new voters, the majority of whom are in thrall to the Democrats, and that’s enough to tip all the swing states blue.
Any public outrage over their current conduct can’t hold a candle to that payday down the road.
Meaning that this is a race against time, and at the current pace of 350,000 deportations a year that the Trump administration is currently on, we will fall well short of draining away that supply of captive Democrat voters that the rest of the country has no desire to see. We need a tenfold increase in that number, if not more.
And the only way to make that happen is to open the pipeline wider than it is.
I’ve posted, at The American Spectator a couple of weeks ago, that one way to do this is to start bribing illegals to self-deport with free plane tickets and even cash bonuses. The Trump administration is implementing that, and while it’s a greasy and distasteful way to approach the problem it’s necessary. One reason why is that if the illegals are willing to take a few bucks to go home on their own, perhaps in recognition that we’ve cut off access to welfare programs and started cracking down on the hiring of illegals (a couple of things which must be done but won’t be so easy), there is nothing the Left can do about it.
And it’s a whole lot cheaper than having to go through the kind of legal wringer the Left is preparing for all of the Kilmars and others currently being deported, particularly when the cases aren’t quite so exigent.
But the other way to open the pipeline wider is to ramp up access to “due process.” That’s where getting local law enforcement essentially deputized by ICE, and National Guard JAG’s and other lawyers installed as supplemental immigration judges under color of state law as part of an arrangement with the feds – which is helpful, in that you’re now going to be in federal judicial districts in red states far less likely to produce left-wing activists who’ll try to stop the process – will make this thing go from dial-up to broadband pretty quickly.
We’d love to see Louisiana follow suit. Texas, too. Build out an infrastructure controlled by red states in which deportees are given a cursory hearing, their identity checked and status as illegals subject to deportation upheld, and then on their way they go.
We have facilities to temporarily house these deportees and we have lots of lawyers with not enough to do (which is one reason our car insurance rates are so high). We’re a perfect place for ICE to bring these people – they’ve already brought several high-profile deportees here – and process them out. We even have a good-sized airport in Alexandria, which used to be England Air Force Base, which has tons of capacity to serve as a hub for deportation flights.
Let’s make this happen. If we need industries to come to the state, and we do, maybe one of them is to make Louisiana the Deportation Capital of America. Why let Florida take all the glory?