In an interview with Bill O’Reilly in which Donald Trump responded to reports that he’s backing off his vow of mass deportations—a promise he’s made many times—Trump basically admitted the whole story he’s been telling about immigration for the last year is a big scam.
Asked directly by O’Reilly whether he is “really rethinking your mass deportation strategy,” Trump replied: “I just want to follow the law. What I’m doing is following the law . . . We’re going to obey the existing laws.”
Trump added:
“The first thing we’re gonna do, if and when I win, is we’re gonna get rid of all the bad ones. We have gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. . . they’re gonna be out of this country so fast your head will spin. We have existing laws that allow you to do that. As far as everybody else, we’re going to go through the process. What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country. Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.”
At another point, Trump was pressed on whether he agreed with President Eisenhower, whose Operation Wetback, as O’Reilly said, “rounded them up” and “took them out.” Trump replied: “I don’t agree with that. I’m not talking about detention centers.” What that means: What Trump called “everybody else”—i.e., lower level offenders with jobs and ties to communities—will remain subject to removal but will not be targeted by proactive stepped-up deportation efforts.
Here are the key takeaways from all this:
Trump tacitly conceded that our borders are not “open,” and that our laws are being enforced. In saying that “Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country” by using “existing laws,” Trump admitted that in fact, under Obama, the borders are not open and the laws are being enforced. Those are extraordinary concessions given that his entire candidacy rests so heavily on precisely the opposite assertions.
Trump tacitly admitted that Obama’s enforcement priorities are correct. In saying that “the first thing we’re gonna do” is “we’re gonna get rid of all the bad ones,” Trump basically endorsed what Obama has been doing for the last five years.
But Trump did not make any meaningful outreach gesture towards Latinos. It’s crucial to understand that Trump only moved in Obama’s direction in a very limited way. While he did endorse Obama’s underlying enforcement priorities, he did not embrace the idea of either legalizing all the remaining lower level offenders or of using executive action to temporarily shield them from deportation and allow them to work, so they can come out of the shadows and pay taxes. Indeed, he repeatedly said that “existing laws” will remain in place.
That is not a long-term solution to the problem, and in the end what all this really means is that Trump—the great fixer—is still not taking a real position on the core dilemma we face.
Democrats say we should focus those limited enforcement resources on serious criminals, and in order to facilitate that and make our immigration machinery work more effectively in the national interest we should create a path to assimilation—with penalties—for the rest, rather than continuing to leave them in limbo, subject to removal. Trump basically admitted Democrats are right about the former. He also implicitly conceded that the solution he has offered for the rest for the last year now—their proactive, speedy removal—isn’t going to happen. Trump did not know that he was admitting all of this, because he doesn’t understand the finer points of immigration policy. But that is what happened.