Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday. But, later his evening he told a TV audience that Trump’s policy “could represent a huge threat to Mexico, and I am not prepared to keep my arms crossed and do nothing”.
Advertisement
“We are united by our support for democracy, our love for our people, and the contributions of millions of Mexican Americans to the United States”, Trump said in Mexico City.
Still, Trump laid out a series of tough policies to tackle illegal immigration when he delivered his speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night.
“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation”, Trump said, reiterating a position he’s expressed before, but recently backed away from.
Trump mentioned high-profile California cases of people allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants – Kate Steinle last year in San Francisco, Marilyn Pharis last year in Santa Maria, and Placer County sheriff’s Detective Michael Davis and Sacramento County sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver in 2014 in Sacramento.
Pundits said the speech could be seen as an attempt by Mr Trump to shore up his base, instead of an attempt to broaden it.
Trump’s “America First” positions are aimed at rallying middle-class people who feel they have lost jobs to illegal immigrants or to the outsourcing of jobs overseas. He’s made it clear where he stands. ‘And Mexico will pay for the wall, 100 per cent. “They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay for the wall”.
It came as a surprise when Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invited Donald Trump this week to meet with him in Mexico City.
Trump told reporters during his afternoon appearance with Pena Nieto that the two men didn’t discuss who would pay for the construction, pegged in the billions. “This is the central piece of his campaign – immigration and deportation, and we’re going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it”.
Eventually he lumped rival Hillary Clinton in with undocumented criminals and mused about whether he should deport her, too. However, he offered only a mild rebuke of Trump for his rhetoric. “Both countries, we’re all going to win”.
And his refusal to back legislation that would offer a path to legal status and his proposal to expand e-Verify program would make it more hard for such immigrants to remain in the country.
After weeks of reports that Trump might be softening his immigration platform, he proposed hiring 5,000 new border patrol agents, tripling the number of immigration enforcement officers and immediately deporting anyone caught illegally entering the country. He had previously called for the immediate removal of all such individuals and pledged to create a “deportation force” to oversee the task.
Trump has problems, but the bigger problem is that Republican primary voters thought that Donald J. Trump was fit for the White House.
He brought the parents of Americans slain by undocumented immigrants onto the stage, asking them to briefly tell their stories.
Advertisement
“And when I heard him explain his rationale, it didn’t really make that much sense to me, but you got to respect people’s ability to act according to their conscience”.
