Donald Trump isn’t only looking to reinstate the extreme, anti-immigration policies of his first term if he wins in November; he is seeking to take things a step further. “We have to do something about it,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in a town hall Tuesday, repeating his ugly 2015 claim that other countries are “not sending their finest” to the United States. “We have the worst border in the history of the world.”
Claiming that countries are “emptying out their prisons” into the U.S., Trump reiterated his plans to carry out mass deportations, which he has promised on the campaign trail would be the “largest” in American history. Of course, he was vague on the details, telling Ingraham that he would “get the bad ones out first,” which he’d find using “local police.”
Nevertheless, the remarks provided yet another glimpse into the radical border policies he’d pursue in a second term—which, as the Washington Post reported Wednesday, could include mobilizing the military for immigration enforcement and the establishment of deportation camps along the border. “Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the outlet. Undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable,” she added, “because very soon they will be going home.”
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The plans are dangerous and “dehumanizing,” as critics point out. “Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook,” former Homeland Security Department lawyer Genevieve Nadeau said in a report by Protect Democracy. The Trump team plans are “psychotic,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of staff Jason Houser echoed to the Post. Yet, Trump’s allies have rallied behind them. “It’s an industrial scale problem,” as Florida Representative Mike Waltz told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney Wednesday, arguing that the equivalent of “the population of Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont” would “have to be completely cleaned out, rounded up, and deported.”
Trump and the Republicans have sought to wield immigration against President Joe Biden in this year’s election—even going so far as to tank a bipartisan border bill that would have implemented some of the stricter policies they themselves had demanded. In response, Biden has used the GOP’s cynical move to flip the script, saying Trump would rather “weaponize this issue than actually solve it.” The president is also reportedly considering his own actions to limit asylum-seekers and speed up deportations. Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump from veering more and more rightward. “I don’t think he can ever even come close” to fixing the problem, Trump told Ingraham of his opponent Tuesday.
