{"id":51241,"date":"2025-02-02T08:33:21","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T16:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=51241"},"modified":"2025-02-02T08:33:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-02T16:33:21","slug":"heritage-foundation-project-wants-to-weaponize-selective-service-registration-against-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/02\/heritage-foundation-project-wants-to-weaponize-selective-service-registration-against-immigrants\/","title":{"rendered":"Heritage Foundation Project Wants To Weaponize Selective Service Registration Against Immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to an exclusive report by Fox News<\/a>, the Oversight Project<\/a> of the Heritage Foundation<\/a> is filing Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Selective Service System<\/a> and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records of how many \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d may have violated US law by failing to register with the SSS<\/a> for a possible future military draft<\/a>. Fox News quotes the FOIA request as alleging that, \u201cthere is widespread criminal non-compliance by such aliens\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Oversight Project appears to misunderstand both immigration and Selective Service law. With respect to \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d, seeking asylum isn\u2019t illegal \u2013 it\u2019s a human right. By international treaty<\/a>, penalties cannot lawfully be imposed on refugees for \u201cillegal entry or presence\u201d. And failing to register with the Selective Service System<\/a> is a crime only if it is \u201cknowing and willful\u201d, which it usually isn\u2019t. Most immigrants are unaware, until the question comes up on an application for naturalization, that they are supposed to sign up for a possible U.S. draft even if they aren\u2019t U.S. citizens<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But quotes in the Fox News article from Executive Director Mike Howell<\/a> and Chief Counsel Kyle Brosnan<\/a> of the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Oversight Project suggest that the goal of their FOIA requests is to put pressure on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to embark on bound-to-fail attempts to prosecute immigrants for failing to register with Selective Service:<\/p>\n

\u201cHowell said the FOIA request\u2019s results could go beyond the scope of just determining whether undocumented residents of the U.S. may have attempted to avoid the draft \u2013 but also potentially offer an additional avenue for\u2026 mass deportation plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith failure to register with SSS being a felony and a deportable offense, Howell said that… it could provide simplified legal grounds for the mass deportation plans of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

“\u2018You can turn a class of individuals into potential criminals overnight. What it also means is you don’t need ICE necessarily to do it. [Alleged SSS violators] would be prosecuted by DOJ. That means they’re in other beds that aren’t ICE beds. So you’re looking at all of them being in federal prison potentially, as opposed to taking up space in ICE custody,\u2019 Howell said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Immigrants shouldn\u2019t be scared, however, by these threats of deportation or prosecution for not having signed up for the draft.<\/p>\n

The government can\u2019t deport people on mere suspicion of criminality. It can only deport them as criminals only after they\u2019ve been, you know, convicted<\/em> of a crime \u2013 by a jury, based on proof beyond reasonable doubt\u00a0 of each element of the offense charged. In the case of refusal to register, that would need to include evidence, which almost never exists, that they knew they were supposed to register.<\/p>\n

The absence of evidence of knowledge and willfulness to support conviction means that most threats of prosecution for refusal to register, such as the hundreds of thousands of auto-generated threatening letters<\/a> the SSS mails out each year, are empty threats.<\/p>\n

Some of these threatening letters are sent by the SSS to immigrants<\/a> identified from records shared between the SSS and other government agencies<\/a>, including visa and immigration records from US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS). We don\u2019t know as much about this as we should, since neither the SSS nor USCIS has published the notices of this data sharing<\/a> required by the Computer Matching Act and the Privacy Act. But we do know that these threats are hollow and can be ignored.<\/p>\n

The one time since the start of the current registration program in 1980<\/a> that the DOJ tried to prosecute<\/a> an innocent immigrant for failure to register, in 1984, it had to drop the case in embarrassment when it became clear that the man indicted, Phetsamay Maokhamphio, didn\u2019t know he was supposed to have registered. Since 1988, the DOJ has refused to prosecute<\/a> any nonregistrants, and in 2022 the DOJ told the SSS to stop sending the DOJ lists of possible nonregistrant<\/a>s, since the DOJ knew it wasn\u2019t going to do anything with them. It\u2019s precisely this inability to enforce the registration requirement through criminal prosecutions that has led the SSS to propose an equally unworkable scheme<\/a> to try to register young people \u201cautomatically\u201d by aggregating other government and commercial databases.<\/p>\n

The White House could, of course, order the DOJ to gear up to try to prosecute some nonregistrants. But in the absence of evidence of knowledge and willfulness, those prosecutions would likely fail. And prosecutions of deliberate nonregistrants<\/a> whose public statements could be used against them in court would likely prove as counterproductive as they did in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Both Howell and Brosnan of the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Oversight Project<\/a> are also among the contributors<\/a> to the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025<\/a>. Using Selective Service registration as a tool for imprisonment or deportation of immigrants seems more closely aligned with the goals of Project 2025 than with the Heritage Foundation\u2019s longstanding and unequivocal position against draft registration. As recently as July 2024, Victoria Coates<\/a>, Vice-President of the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy reiterated<\/a> that, \u201cAs the\u202fHeritage Foundation has stated before, the current Selective Service registration system should be shut down<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether the latest moves by the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Oversight Project indicate a reversal of the organization\u2019s position on draft registration, or indicate that Project 2025 has been disconnected from, and prioritized over, the elements of libertarianism in the Heritage Foundation\u2019s established policy positions as well any assessment of the legality or feasibility of the proposed enforcement<\/a> scheme.<\/p>\n

The Project 2025 playbook<\/a> doesn\u2019t explicitly mention Selective Service registration or the possibility of a military draft. President Biden never appointed a Director of Selective Service, leaving the SSS under an Acting Director throughout his term. President Trump has not yet appointed a Director of the SSS for his second term \u2013 leaving the same holdover Acting Director in charge, for now \u2013 and has yet to make any statement with respect to Selective Service registration or a possible draft.<\/p>\n

Edward Hasbrouck maintains the <\/em>Resisters.info<\/em><\/a> website and publishes the <\/em>\u201cResistance News\u201d newsletter<\/em><\/a>. He was <\/em>imprisoned in 1983-1984<\/em><\/a> for organizing resistance to draft registration.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to an exclusive report by Fox News, the Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation is filing Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Selective Service System and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records of how many \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d may have violated US law by failing to register with the SSS for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-51241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51241"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51245,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51241\/revisions\/51245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51241"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=51241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}