Appearing on Fox News on Monday night, Cruz told Bill O’Reilly that’s exactly what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meant to do.
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An additional 72% feel that the federal government should be far more proactive when it comes to finding those visitors who have overstayed their visa requirements and deporting them.
Other Republican candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump have previously criticised the Cruz campaign after his staffers were accused of falsely telling voters that Mr Carson had dropped out of the race just hours before the Iowa caucuses.
“I understand that Marco’s campaign team believes it’s politically advantageous to try to distract the topic from his own record”, Cruz said.
Cruz at that time said he would not send officials to people’s homes across the U.S. He said that was not the way to enforce the law, as we are not in a police state.
Cruz has slowly shifted his position on deportations to The Full Trump – perhaps stung by the amount of support Trump has received from evangelicals and conservatives, and hoping to out-Trump Trump.
O’Reilly: Here’s a policy question I need you to define for me tonight: 12 million illegal aliens here in America.
“The Rubio campaign quickly jumped to correct the record, posting a corrected video where the Florida senator says: “[You’ve] got a good book there.
In an interview with CNN in January, Cruz had said he would not deploy a “deportation force” against immigrants.
Cruz is also known to be a staunch critic of the immigration policies of Mark Rubio, another presidential candidate for the same party.
“I think he should forget about Rubio completely and focus on Trump”, said Bob Vander Plaats, one of Cruz’s national co-chairs. Mr. Trump would look for them to get them out.
O’Reilly then suggested, “So Tommy O’Malley from County Cork in Ireland is over here and he overstays his visa and he’s got a couple kids and he’s settled into Long Island”.
O’Reilly pushed Cruz to definitively answer whether he would “go look for them”, referring to undocumented immigrants in the country. “That’s now how we enforce the law for any crime”. “They want their darned country back, which is why they’re aligning with the most divisive, craptastic figure ever to attempt to run for president”.
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Alex Conant, Rubio’s spokesman, said in a statement, “There is a culture in the Cruz campaign, from top to bottom, that no lie is too big and no trick too dirty”. At the time, I described it as “tough on legal immigrants [and] tougher on unauthorized ones”.
