Donald Trump is no fan of illegal immigrants.
The problem, Trump reckons, is that Mexico “isn’t sending their best people.” “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” the bellicose billionaire famously remarked last summer when his bid for The White House was still largely regarded as a sideshow.
“Some, I assume, are good people,” he added, apparently realizing that what he just said might be rather inflammatory.
Since then, Trump hasn’t let up at all on immigration. In fact, he’s gone out of his way to let the American electorate know that he wouldn’t just seek to shore up the border with Mexico (by forcing the country to pay for a wall), he also wants to create an invisible anti-Islam fence to keep Muslims from coming to America “until we can figure out what’s going on” that makes tragedies like the San Bernardino massacre possible.
Of course Trump also wants to deport all illegal immigrants. “They have to go,” he said aboard his 757 in an August interview with Chuck Todd. “We either have a country or we don’t.”
All of this comes as the Obama administration has had a difficult time implementing an executive order designed to shield non-violent migrants from deportation.
In December, the Department of Homeland Security began to prepare to deport hundreds of families who came to the US in 2015 fleeing Central America. “The nationwide campaign, to be carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as soon as early January, would be the first large-scale effort to deport families who have fled violence in Central America,” The Washington Post reported at the time, adding that “groups that have called for stricter immigration limits said the raids are long overdue and remained skeptical about whether the scale would be large enough to deter future illegal immigration from Central America.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies told WaPo. “What share is this going to be?. . . It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number they’ve admitted into the country. If you have photogenic raids on a few dozen illegal families and that’s the end of it, it’s just for show. It’s just a [public relations] thing, enforcement theater.”
Krikorian, it turns out, was wrong. The DHS chief Jeh Johnson said on Thursday that the deportations have sharply reduced the number of Central American migrants entering the country. "I know this has made a lot of people I respect very unhappy," Johnson said, "But we must enforce the law in accordance with our priorities."
Yes, yes you “must” and here are the results as reported yesterday by NBC: “Since the enforcement action began in late December, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the southwest border dropped 54 percent, and the number of those in families fell 65 percent.”
We're reasonably sure those figures will please Donald Trump as they seemingly prove that deportations have a direct and pronouned impact on the number of people streaming across the southern border. We can almost here to stump speech soundbite now. As VOA notes, "Trump applauded the raids last month and took partial credit for them, claiming the pressure he placed on the administration had resulted in the deportations."
One person who isn't enamored with the DHS effort is Bernie Sanders who VOA goes on to say "wrote a letter to the president, asking for the raids to stop and for the country to protect the immigrants."
The White House defended the program. "This is consistent with the way we've described our priorities, that we are seeking to deport felons, " spokesman John Earnest said, "not break apart families."
In January, protesters staged demonstrations in front of the White House in an effort to convince the president to stop the raids. One immigrant who arrived illegally from El Salvador 36 years ago and eventually became a citizen said he would go on hunger strike. "I think I'm going to lose some of the pounds I need to lose," he told VOA. "At least they are going to listen."
It turns out they didn't listen and if the numbers out of the DHS are any indication of the effect deportations will have, you can expect Trump to cite these stats as proof positive of why all illegal immigrants should be sent back where they came from.
And you can surely expect Bernie Sanders to take the other side of the argument - and quite fervently so. That should make for a spirited debate assuming both "protest" candidates receive their party's nomination.
As for Obama, the President doesn't seem to know if he wants immigrants to stay or go.