After a whirlwind Wednesday that brought Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to Mexico City for a meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto and then to Arizona for a landmark speech on immigration, it’s clear that the debate over immigration reform will be a central issue for the remainder of the election cycle. He has been advised from within the party to ease his stance in order to win them back.
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“Trump would never have had a chance of being part of the Reagan Revolution”, said Linda Chavez, a Boulder resident who served as the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House and later chaired the National Commission on Migrant Education under President George H.W. Bush. “We felt a little bit misled”, Alfonso Aguilar of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, told CNN, referring to Trump’s language about deporting undocumented immigrants who have not committed a crime.
“For the last two months he said he was not going to deport people without criminal records”. Clinton supporters are rushing to register Latinos here while the Trump campaign says its message will resonate with them in November – despite weak polling.
At a campaign rally on Thursday in Wilmington, Ohio, Trump said his immigration plan would treat everyone with “dignity, respect and compassion” but prioritize compassion for American citizens and include some kind of ideological screening. “We have no idea who these people are, where they come from”, he said, wrongly.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump revised his immigration speech after the president of Mexico disputed his telling of their discussions of a border wall.
Trump took a last-minute visit to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with the president of Mexico, whose people Trump regularly insults during the 2016 campaign.
After flipping and flopping on the topic of immigration, perhaps Donald Trump has learned this lesson: His fans are not thirsting for a more humane, welcoming Republican candidate.
“From a political perspective, this is the end of Donald Trump”.
Jacob Monty, a Texas attorney and member of the group, said he was withdrawing his support and would not vote in the November 8 election.
“People will know that you can’t just smuggle in, hunker down and wait to be legalized”, Trump declared in his hard-line speech Wednesday night.
Trump was reportedly peeved that Peña Nieto made that portion of their conversation public, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Hillary Clinton is seizing on Trump’s immigration approach as a way to energize the Democratic base and also to perhaps appeal to independents.
“There’s several of us who have gone out on a limb, if you will, to try to at least be at the table of reason with him, and that’s left us confused and disappointed”, said Tony Suarez, the executive vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
Hillary Clinton’s net favorability rating is plus-39.
An update this morning to the story, from the Times: “After this article was published online Thursday night, Jason Miller, the senior communications adviser for the Trump campaign, said that Mr. Trump’s plans had changed and that he would address the congregation for five to 10 minutes after the interview”.
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“Mexico will pay for the wall, 100 percent”, the NY businessman said.
