Trump is very OK with deporting U.S. citizens to achieve his grim vision for America.
The president-elect sat for a testy, nearly hour-long interview with Meet the Press’s Kristen Welker, in which he doubled down on some of the cruelest parts of his “Day 1” platform.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families. So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump said.
“Even kids who are here legally?” Welker asked.
“We have to have rules and regulations. You can always find something out like, you know, ‘This doesn’t work. That doesn’t work,’” Trump continued. “I’ll tell you what’s going to be horrible, when we take a wonderful young woman who’s with a criminal. And they show the woman … being taken out. Or they want her out and your cameras are focused on her as she’s crying as she’s being taken out of our country. And then the public turns against us. But we have to do our job. And you have to have a series of standards and a series of laws. And in the end, look, our country is a mess.”
The president-elect calmly acknowledged how evil, damaging, and unpopular the policy would be to American families. But he seems to think that deporting entire families, rather than separating them at the border like he did in his first term, will be more palatable. Regardless of how he tries to do it, the “largest deportation operation in American history” is likely to be a painful mess, especially given that he wants to send deportees back to random countries. The president-elect also wants to end one of the most basic tenets of the constitution—birthright citizenship.
