It’s official: Donald Trump’s plan for massive deportations would apply to legal immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants.
During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status.
“Springfield is such a beautiful place; have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. They have to be removed,” Trump said.
“So you would revoke the Temporary Protected Status?” asked the interviewer.
“Absolutely, I’d revoke it and I’d bring them back to their country,” Trump said.
During his first administration, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.
Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.
It’s not surprising that Trump has gotten to this place. The former president has falsely claimed that Springfield suffered a “hostile takeover” by undocumented immigrants and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had begun eating their neighbors’ pets.
Last month, after practically admitting that he’d created the story about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance also said that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants.
“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said, during a campaign event in North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”
During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance echoed this rhetoric when he was fact-checked about the Haitian immigrants’ legal status. He ranted that Harris could grant citizenship “at the wave of a Kamala-Harris-open-border wand.”
Both Trump’s and Vance’s statements demonstrate that under a second Trump administration, no legal immigrant will be safe in the United States because the president could always decide that there are too many of them, create some story, and then kick them out.
