Donald Trump’s agenda regarding immigration and deportations is already radical. The former president has, after all, raised the prospect of militarized deportations and mass detention camps. Indeed, he’s made little effort to deny the scope and scale of his right-wing plans.
But what’s less appreciated is what the Republican and his team intend to do with people who entered the United States legally.
A few weeks ago, for example, as the GOP’s presidential ticket peddled ugly and dangerous lies about Springfield, Ohio, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance was reminded that the Haitian immigrants in question are not, in reality, “illegals.” The Ohio senator replied that because he disagreed with the existing legal process, “I’m still going to call them an illegal alien.”
In other words, American laws are all fine and good, but as far as the senator was concerned, a Trump/Vance administration would be free to decide who is and is not in the country legally. Vance didn’t express hostility toward the rule of law, so much as he expressed indifference.
Three weeks later, his running mate said effectively the same thing. As Rolling Stone summarized:
Donald Trump threw logic out the window on Tuesday. During an interview with Newsmax, the former president claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio — who haven been given Temporary Protected Status and are in the U.S. legally — are ‘illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.’
In the former president’s latest Newsmax interview, he seemed to briefly acknowledge that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are not undocumented, shortly before concluding that he considers them “illegal immigrants” anyway — because he says so.
“They are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned” — Trump on Newsmax claims legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio are actually illegal immigrants pic.twitter.com/yAFfpmprRD
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 8, 2024
This is consistent with Trump’s usual attitude toward the rule of law, but it also offers a timely reminder to the public: When the Republican nominee talks about launching a mass deportation policy affecting a significant percentage of the country’s residents, legal immigrants have reason to be concerned, too.
Because as Trump told a national television audience, his standards are guided by his whims and preferences, not his own country’s laws. As a Washington Post analysis summarized last week, “Whom does Trump plan to deport? Whomever Trump wants to deport.” It is by now well-established that the process of identifying, detaining and removing millions of people from the country would be enormously challenging and destabilizing, both economically and to individual communities. What Trump’s and Vance’s claims have reinforced is that it would also be arbitrary, with legal immigrants viewed as undesirable to the president and his supporters slated for ouster, while other groups remain in relative protection.
I’m reminded of a New York Times report published in July about Latino voters and their perceptions of the Republican’s plans. Many, the article noted, were “unfamiliar with Mr. Trump’s platform, including his plans to round up undocumented people on a mass scale and to detain them in camps pending their deportation.” They might be surprised by just how far the GOP candidate is prepared to go.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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