Use of National Guard for immigration roundup denied

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration denied Friday that it was considering using National Guard troops as a deportation force to round up undocumented immigrants, rebutting a report by The Associated Press that cited an 11-page memorandum describing such an effort.

A senior administration official at the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the memo in the news report was an early draft that never made it to the secretary and was not seriously considered by the department.

The AP said the memo would militarize enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws by authorizing state governors to mobilize up to 100,000 National Guard troops to find people who were not authorized to be in the United States and send them home.

Under the memo, the troops would be acting to carry out President Donald Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order, in which he directed the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico and called for a more aggressive effort to deport undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s order called for a larger number of border patrol and customs agents, but that would require more money from Congress, something that is many months away, at best.

A proposal to use the National Guard could, in theory, provide more resources to the department. But it also would raise alarms among advocates for immigrants, who for years have fought against giving local law enforcement the authority to search for and detain undocumented immigrants on behalf of the federal immigration services.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said Friday morning that the AP report was “100 percent not true.”

He said “there is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants,” Spicer said. He added that “I wish you guys had asked before you tweeted.”

An AP reporter noted that the news service asked for comment multiple times before the article was published.