Former United States President Donald Trump, if re-elected in 2024, would expand his first-term immigration offensive to include arrests of undocumented immigrants who would be held in large camps awaiting deportation, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The report was based on interviews with several advisers, including Stephen Miller, who oversaw immigration policies in Trump’s first term, the Times said.
He described Trump’s plans as “an assault on immigration on a scale never seen in modern American history” and said his goal was to deport millions of people each year, including those who have been settled in the United States for decades.
Trump, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, would resurrect his entry ban on people from certain Muslim-majority countries, according to the newspaper.
It would revive other hardline policies, including the rejection of COVID-19-era asylum claims, although this time the denials would be based on claims that migrants are carriers of other infectious diseases, he continued.
Trump is seeking to speed up deportations through a massive expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings, the newspaper said.
To assist the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) in detaining undocumented immigrants, Trump would reassign federal agents and make volunteers from the United States available to local police and National Guard troops. states governed by Republicans, according to the report.
It would ease pressure on ICE detention centers by building huge camps to house detainees while their cases are processed while they await deportation.
To fund the massive operation if Congress refuses, Trump would redirect Pentagon funds as he did with his border wall in his first term, the Times said.
Trump hinted at his plan at a September rally in Iowa, the newspaper said, quoting him as saying he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history” along the lines of the “Eisenhower model.”
That was a 1954 campaign named with an ethnic insult – Operation Wetbacks – to detain and expel Mexican immigrants. (Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Edited in Spanish by Manuel Farías)
Source: Ambito
