‘We Have No Choice’: Trump Vows to Create ‘Largest Deportation Effort’ in U.S. History If Reelected
by Ryan Mills, NationalReview.com, January 10, 2024
Former president Donald Trump vowed during his Fox News town hall on Wednesday night to create the “largest deportation effort in the history of our country” if he is reelected in November, saying “we have no choice.”
Trump, the leading contender for the Republican nomination, said that as many as 18 million people will have entered the country illegally by the end of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency, a number that he said is “not sustainable for our country.”
“Many of those people come from jails and prisons, many of those people come from mental institutions and insane asylums, and many of those people are terrorists,” he said, taking another big swing on the issue that helped to propel him to the White House in 2016.
In addition to bashing Biden for having “the worst border in the history of the world” and vowing to “finish the wall” at the Southern border, Trump used his town hall appearance to talk up his first-term record and to bash Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he said would “be working in a pizza shop, or maybe a law firm” if he hadn’t received Trump’s endorsement in 2018. Trump said he took DeSantis “from nothing to winning an election,” and he said the Florida governor, whose presidential campaign has underperformed, is not “a loyal person.”
During his debate with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley on Wednesday night, DeSantis pushed back on the idea that Trump would successfully deport large numbers of illegal immigrants, saying that during his first term he deported fewer people than former president Barack Obama.
Trump’s town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by Fox anchors Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, served as counterprogramming to CNN’s debate at the same time between DeSantis and Haley, Trump’s two top competitors for the nomination. Fox hosted town halls with Haley and DeSantis earlier this week.
With a commanding lead in virtually all the polls, Trump has boycotted the Republican debates, choosing to hold his own events or to do counterprogramming instead.
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