The mayor of Denver isn’t the only one asserting a city or state’s “sanctuary” status, but he’s threatening armed resistance:

The Democrat Mayor of Denver, Colorado Mike Johnston has challenged Trump to try to deport any illegal migrants from his city, saying he would deploy the Denver City Police and volunteers from the local community to use force against federal forces trying to deport illegals.

“More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there. It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun… You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. You don’t want to mess with them.”

High drama is being evoked, tanks mowing down mothers who are protecting innocent families. But Trump has made it clear – and I assume this will hold up – that the primary goal at this point is twofold: deport criminal aliens who are here illegally and are under already-existent deportation orders, and stop the vast influx of new illegal arrivals. Do those Highland moms of Denver really want to protect those who would traffic and/or rape their children, or at least commit fraud of various kinds?

Here’s a description of the “Highland moms,” in case you’re interested:

The “Highland moms” the mayor referred to are the group of citizens who organized donation drives for immigrants when waves of them started showing up in Denver toward the end of last year.

I wonder what the Highland moms have to say about this sort of thing (Aurora is a Denver suburb):

Chamberlain said police believe there are between 10 and 20 suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang active in Aurora, out of roughly 1,100 members of various gangs identified in the city. At least nine Tren de Aragua members have been arrested, and a multi-agency task force is investigating the gang’s presence.

The whole question of Trump pledging to use the military is a complex one, and I may write a separate post about it sometime. But in the meantime here’s an article that goes into how it might be done. Note that Trump already declared a state of emergency in his first term regarding illegal border crossings. Here are some relevant excerpts:

“For basically the past 40 years, the military’s involvement at the border has been steadily growing,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, “And it has gone from sort of ad hoc to routine to deeply entrenched into how we approach border security and immigration.”

Members of the military stationed at the border have historically performed an array of support tasks, experts tell CBS News – from operating surveillance aircrafts and transporting U.S. Border Patrol personnel in helicopters to laying concertina wire and maintaining Customs and Border Protection vehicles.

Homan’s suggestions of using the military for some of the operational work that doesn’t involve engaging with migrants would fall under this category and would be an expansion of the duties National Guard and a small number of active-duty troops have performed at the southern border under previous administrations. As recently as last year, troops were deployed to the border to help Border Patrol with administrative tasks, like warehouse management and clerical work.

Military involvement now “is just essentially to get access to more bodies and more aircrafts,” Nunn explained, calling military mobilization a force multiplier. “Suppose you want to set up a checkpoint on a highway in Texas or Arizona. Under normal circumstances, you need five CBP agents to run a checkpoint. If you have access to military personnel, you can run a checkpoint with one CBP agent assisted by four soldiers. Then suddenly five CBP agents assisted by soldiers can run five checkpoints instead of one.”

It seems to me that a great deal of any military presence would be at the border. It also occurs to me that some of what Trump is saying is designed to discourage potential illegal entrants who are thinking of getting in while Biden is still nominally president.