Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) criticized President-elect Donald Trump over his plans to enlist the military to help deport illegal immigrants.
Trump announced earlier this week that his administration would declare a national emergency and use military resources to carry out his campaign promise to deport illegal immigrants.
While he strongly supports Trump’s health policy agenda priorities for his second term in office, Paul broke with the president-elect over the announcement during a Newsmax interview on Tuesday.
“I’m not in favor of sending the Army in uniforms into our cities to collect people,” he said. “That’s not what we use our military for. We never have. And it’s actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities.”
“I think it’s a terrible image,” Paul said.
A supporter of several of Trump’s top Cabinet picks, Paul has emerged as a critical ally of the president-elect in the upper chamber as the Senate heads toward likely tough confirmation votes. Paul is a friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whom the former president tapped to be the director of national intelligence.
Paul has also praised Trump’s move to create a new Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to cut bureaucratic waste and promote innovation.
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Although he didn’t endorse Trump for president this year, Paul supports stronger border security measures and addressing illegal immigration. But when it comes to Trump’s plans to invoke military resources to deport illegal immigrants, the Kentucky senator is not a fan.
“Our Army and our military are trained to shoot the enemy. They’re not trained to get a warrant to do what they’re doing,” he said Tuesday, later concluding that “the police have a difficult job, but the people removing people from our country need to be a police enforcement domestic agency, not the military.”