How Trump is banking on 18th-century laws for his border and citizenship promises

President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to dust off a series of centuries-old laws and legal theories to drive his first-year agenda – particularly on the border and birthright citizenship – hoping history will be on his side when the inevitable legal challenges make their way to the Supreme Court.

President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to dust off a series of centuries-old laws and legal theories to drive his first-year agenda — particularly on the border and birthright citizenship — hoping history will be on his side when the inevitable legal challenges make their way to the Supreme Court. The incoming president has said he intends to use an obscure 1798 law with a sordid backstory to speed deportations and has hinted at the possibility of invoking a separate law with roots in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 to deploy the military on American soil. Immigration isn’t the only policy in play: Some of his allies, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have advocated for enforcing an 1873 chastity law that could bar sending abortion drugs through the mail. Trump has framed the laws as harking back to a more muscular time in American politics, suggesting he may use the powers signed into law by Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others to confront the “enemy from within” and carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. “Think of that: We had to go back to 1798,” Trump told a conservative gathering in Georgia days before the November election. “That’s when we had laws that were effective.” But at least some of the authorities Trump is preparing to claim have fraught histories — and their invocation will queue up confrontations with an unpopular 6-3 conservative Supreme Court that is being closely watched for its appetite to act as a guardrail on the new administration.