WASHINGTON - Former US president Donald Trump, if re-elected in 2024, would expand his first-term immigration crackdown to include sweeping round-ups of people who would be held in large camps to await deportation, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The report was based on interviews with several advisers, including Mr Stephen Miller, who oversaw Trump’s first-term immigration policies, the Times said.
It described Trump’s plans as “an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history” and said it aimed to deport millions of people every year, including those who have settled in the United States for decades.
Trump is the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and he will likely face US President Joe Biden in a rematch of their 2020 contest.
Trump’s election campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The White House declined to comment.
In a statement, the Biden-Harris campaign called Trump’s immigration plans “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that are “meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared nation is how he wins this election”.
Among other measures, Trump would resurrect his ban on the entry of people from certain Muslim-majority countries, the newspaper said.
He would also revive other hardline policies, including a Covid-19 pandemic-era rejection of asylum claims, although this time the refusals would be based on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases, it continued.
Trump is looking to speed deportations through a massive expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings, the newspaper said.
To aid US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in sweeping round-ups of undocumented people, Trump would reassign federal agents and deputise local police and National Guard troops volunteered by Republican-run states, the report said.
He would ease the strain on ICE detention facilities by building huge camps to hold detainees while their cases are processed as they await deportation.
To underwrite the massive operation, if Congress refused, Trump would redirect Pentagon funds as he did with his border wall in his first term, the Times said.
Trump hinted at his plan at a September rally in Iowa, said the newspaper, which quoted him as saying that he would conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, along the lines of the “Eisenhower model”.
That refers to a 1954 campaign named after an ethnic slur – Operation Wetback – to detain and expel Mexican immigrants.
Other parts of Trump’s plan call for screening visa applicants for ideological views, revoking the temporary protected status of people from certain countries deemed unsafe, and trying to end the citizenship birthright for babies born in the US to undocumented parents, the newspaper said. REUTERS
