The Republican presidential candidate insisted than any of the estimated 11 million such immigrants who want to seek legal status or citizenship in the United States must return to their home countries in order to do so.
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This campaign stop in Phoenix follows Trump’s visit to Mexico, where he spoke to President Enrique Peña Nieto.
“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation”, Trump said. Hillary Clinton has a different line on immigration.
Anyone living in the country illegally who is arrested “for any crime whatsoever”, he said, will immediately be placed into deportation proceedings.
The Republican presidential nominee firmly shot down speculation on Wednesday that he may be open to legal status for undocumented immigrants, vowing that “no one will be immune or exempt from enforcement”.
He vowed to remove millions of illegal immigrants now living in the United States, insisting any of the 11 million estimated to live here illegally would have to return to their native country before applying to live in the U.S.
Instead, Trump repeated the standard Republican talking point that only after securing the border can such a discussion begin to take place. “Except change his immigration policies”.
Trump’s speech failed to resolve that deportation confusion.
Donald Trump vowed Wednesday “there will be no amnesty”, making his case for a United States less hospitable to, and accessible for, undocumented immigrants.
Trump has spent much of his campaign railing against the U.S.’s trade imbalance with Mexico and other countries and promising that, if he’s elected president, he will punish companies that try to move jobs overseas.
Seeking to end his ambiguity on his immigration positions, he said he would be “fair, just and compassionate” in his plan.
The trip, 10 weeks before America’s presidential Election Day, came just hours before Trump was to deliver a highly anticipated speech in Arizona about illegal immigration.
– “The closeness between the USA and Mexico is more than a relationship between two governments”, Peña Nieto said during a visit to the USA, saying he would work with anyone elected.
He lambasted millions of immigrants as violent criminals and a drain on the US government. Donald pledged that Mexico will pay for the wall 100%, even though their president tweeted that that’s never going to happen!
“At the start of the conversation with Donald Trump, I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall”, he tweeted.
With the meeting held behind closed doors, it was impossible to know who was telling the truth.
But earlier in the day, Mexico’s president said he told Trump his country would not. On “CBS This Morning”, Kaine said Trump “didn’t have the guts to look the Mexican president in the eye” and demand that Mexico pay for the wall.
“The Mexicans deserve everyone’s respect”, he said. “We’re not dropping them right across”, Trump said”. In a March interview, Pena Nieto said that “there is no scenario” under which Mexico would do so and compared Trump’s language to that of dictators Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Trump stayed on script after the meeting, reading a statement from notes and politely answering shouted questions from reporters about his promise to force Mexico to pay for a wall along the border between the two countries. Pena Nieto remained silent on the issue at the event, but then said on Twitter he did raise the issue.
He added, “From there, the conversation addressed other issues, and carried on in a respectful manner”. The candidate is deeply unpopular in Mexico due in large part to his deriding the country as a source of rapists and criminals as he kicked off his campaign.
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– “And I don’t mind having a big, handsome door in that wall so that people can come into this country legally”.
