LA Times Quotes Professor Chin on Trump's Massive Deportation Plans

Los Angeles Times reporter Andrea Castillo interviewed Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin for an Oct. 24 story about former President Donald Trump’s claim that, if re-elected president, he would carry out the “largest deportation in history.”

Trump has said he would invoke the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.

The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime. Chin told the Times he was not convinced Trump could make the act the cornerstone of his immigration policy because the U.S. is not in a declared war with another nation.

“It would have to rest on an argument that random immigration — that is to say immigration based on individual decisions of individual people — is the equivalent of an invasion from a nation-state,” he said. “And that would have to be based on an idea that foreigners as a group are a nation.”

Gabriel “Jack” Chin is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and holder of the Edward L. Barrett Jr. Endowed Chair at UC Davis School of Law. He is a prolific and much-cited criminal and immigration law scholar whose work has addressed many of the most pressing social issues of our time.