What does Donald Trump propose regarding immigration in the face of the US elections?

() – Trump has made immigration and the border a central issue of his campaign, successfully pushing Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal earlier this year and making a trip to the southern border on February 29, where promoted his hardline immigration policies.

In an op-ed published in the Des Moines Register about a week before winning the Iowa primary in January, Trump promised: “I will use the Alien Enemies Act to expel gang members, drug traffickers, and drug dealers from the United States.” or members of known or suspected cartels.”

“We will transfer massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration law enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS,” he wrote.

In a video posted to Truth Social in late February, before his visit to the border, Trump also promised to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

In June, however, Trump proposed “automatically” granting green cards to foreign citizens who graduate from American universities, comments that deviated from his attempts to curb both legal and illegal immigration while he was in office. in office.

After the war between Israel and Hamas began in October last year, Trump also promised to cancel the visas of “Hamas sympathizers.”

“We will remove them from our university campuses, from our cities and we will remove them from our country, if that is okay with you,” he added.

Trump told Time magazine in April that his mass deportation plans would target between 15 million and 20 million people who, according to him, remain undocumented in the United States. However, it is possible that that number be menor.

The Pew Research Center estimated that the illegal immigrant population in the United States will reach 11 million in 2022, based on data drawn from the 2022 American Community Survey, the most recent year available.

Trump has also said that his plan would include the National Guard, although he clarified that he would have no problem “using the military,” because he does not believe that laws intended to prevent the use of the military against civilians within the United States without Congressional approval would apply in this case.

“These are not civilians,” Trump said of the migrants. “These are people who are not legally in our country. “This is an invasion of our country.”

Beyond the doubts about how it will be carried out, it has become clear that it is one of the priorities of the Republican and his main advisors. “If you’re in the country illegally, you better look over your shoulder,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan said in July, warning that no one would be spared.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller has touted plans for what he called “the largest domestic deportation operation in US history.”

And vice presidential candidate JD Vance says deporting criminals would be the administration’s initial focus.

However, experts have said that any path a future Trump administration chooses would be complicated and costly, both because of the billions of dollars needed to fund mass deportation and the significant knock-on effects that would impact the economy.

Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric, in June Trump proposed “automatically” granting green cards to foreigners who graduate from an American university.

His proposal broke with his efforts to curb both legal and illegal immigration during his term and contrasted sharply with his incendiary anti-immigration speech during the election campaign.

“What I want to do, and what I will do, is that if you graduate from a university, I think you should automatically obtain, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to remain in this country,” said the Party candidate. Republican on the podcast “The All-In Podcast”.

And he continued: “And that includes junior colleges too. Anyone who graduates from a university: you go there for two or four years. If you graduate, or get a doctorate from a university, you should be able to stay in this country.”

The statements also clash with his efforts to limit immigration when he was in the White House, including those directed at visa programs that tech companies use to attract thousands of skilled workers, and the order to federal agencies to employ what he called a “Buy American, Hire American” to promote the hiring of American workers. Trump too tried to restrict refugee resettlement and temporarily banned trips from seven Muslim-majority countries during his tenure.

In late 2023, with the war between Israel and Hamas ongoing, Trump said that if elected president again, he will reinstate and expand the travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries, suspend refugee resettlements and aggressively deport those whom he characterized as having “jihadist sympathies.”

During a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, Trump mentioned deadly Hamas attacks in Israel and raised fears about a possible attack on the United States, as he sought to defend his hardline immigration policies. Their proposals would amount to a radical reform of the immigration system.

During his presidency, the travel ban was a signature policy that limited travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The government later expanded the ban to include several African countries. President Joe Biden repealed the measure after taking office in 2021.

Trump also said he would implement “strong ideological control of all immigrants to the United States” and said the country would block “dangerous lunatics, enemies, fanatics and maniacs from obtaining residency in our country.”

He also said he would ban travel from Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya “or any other place that threatens our security.”

Beyond his own initiatives on this matter, the issue of immigration has served Trump to attack his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.

Thus, the former president repeatedly stated that President Biden named her “border czar” and that “she was in charge of the border.” Both things have been denied by the White House. In reality, border security has been a responsibility of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Trump has also attacked Harris on this issue, saying that “she never went to the border,” although the vice president has gone: in mid-2021 and then again in Arizona last month.

Trump has also released a set of statistics on immigrants in the US with homicide convictions, again stating that the figures are specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration: “It was learned that 13,099 were admitted during his administration – they tried to say that it was for a longer time, incorrect: they entered in the last three and a half years -, more than 13,000 people entered: murderers. In reality, the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have pointed out that these numbers are about people who entered the country over decades, including during the Trump administration itself, not just under the Biden-Harris administration.

Additionally, Trump has denounced an unspecified immigration bill from the Biden administration, falsely claiming that it “would have allowed millions of people to become citizens immediately.” The bill Biden proposed to Congress at the start of his administration in 2021 would have offered a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, but over eight years. And the bipartisan 2024 border bill that Trump helped block offered a path to citizenship for tens of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan who came to the US with temporary status after the US withdrawal in 2021. , but that’s not “millions” and, again, it wouldn’t have made them citizens right away.

This article featured information from Catherine E. Shoichet, Zachary B. Wolf‘s Daniel Dale and Steve Contorno.