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Trump retreats on deportations but still wants to build his wall
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DONALD Trump has retreated from his pledge to deport all people living in the United States illegally, but he remains committed to building a physical wall along the US border with Mexico.
The Republican nominee for president promised on Wednesday to remove millions of people living in the country illegally if elected president, warning that failure to do so would jeopardize the “well-being of the American people.”
“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” Trump said in a speech that took place just hours after his surprise meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in his first trip abroad as the GOP nominee.
But Trump also said the effort of a proposed immigration task force in his administration would focus on removing criminals, people who have overstayed their visas and other immediate security threats. He did not elaborate on what would happen to those who have not committed crimes beyond their immigration offenses.
Aimed at ending weeks of confusion over just where he stands on immigration, Trump’s fiery speech in Phoenix was filled with applause lines for his loyal supporters.
Any person living in the country illegally who is arrested “for any crime whatsoever,” he said, will immediately be placed into deportation proceedings. “There will be no amnesty,” he added, saying immigrants in the country without permission who wish to seek legal status or citizenship must return to their home countries in order to do so.
But there was no direct mention of a core promise of his primary campaign to create a “deportation force” that would remove all of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the US illegally.
Trump instead repeated the standard Republican talking point that only after securing the border could a discussion begin to take place about all such immigrants, ducking the major question that has frustrated past congressional attempts at remaking America’s immigration laws.
Even as he beat a retreat from his earlier pledge to deport all illegal immigrants from the country, Trump’s aggressive tone in Phoenix marked a shift from earlier in the day. A much more measured Trump described Mexicans as “amazing people” as he appeared alongside Pena Nieto in Mexico’s capital city.
The good feelings from his first meeting with a head of state as his party’s presidential nominee lasted only a short time, as a dispute arose in the hours after he left Mexico City over the most contentious part of the billionaire’s plans to fight illegal immigration — his insistence that Mexico must pay to build a physical wall along the roughly 3,200-kilometer US southern border.
Trump told reporters during his afternoon appearance with Pena Nieto that the two men didn’t discuss who would pay for a cost of construction pegged in the billions.
The Mexican president, however, later tweeted, “I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall.”
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