Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence laid out an immigration policy for running mate Donald Trump on Sunday morning that would grant some undocumented immigrants the opportunity to legally stay in the United States – after returning to their native country.
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But he wouldn’t directly address whether Trump would stick with his calls during the GOP primary campaign for a “deportation force” to deport those immigrants – or, as Trump has indicated in recent days, back away from that proposal – in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union”.
The announcement came a day after Trump said he would crack down on illegal immigrants who overstay their visas, as he sought to clarify his views on how to overhaul the US immigration system.
He also repeated his basic promise to build a wall on the Mexican border and said that if he wins the election, he will “stop illegal immigrants from accessing welfare and entitlements”.
Other Trump stand-ins, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, spoke similarly, a striking indication that even they don’t know the answer to such a critical question just as Trump has promised to streamline the campaign for the grueling final stretch.
But by Thursday, he was ruling out any kind of legal status – “unless they leave the country and come back”, he told CNN.
Tapper pressed Pence several times on whether Trump specifically still wants a “deportation force” – which he’d called for almost a year ago. But whom Trump considers a criminal remains unclear.
He compared Duke’s support for Trump to the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter’s appearance at a Clinton rally, suggesting neither is relevant to the two presidential candidates.
This story has been corrected to reflect last week’s speech, which was canceled, was scheduled for Colorado, not Phoenix. And late Sunday, the nation’s only African-American owned and operated national Christian television network announced that its president and CEO, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, would interview the Republican nominee in Detroit on September 3.
“The whole question of anchor babies, as it’s known, the whole question of citizenship, of natural-born Americans is a subject for the future”, Pence said. “And this is not a simple question”, said Priebus, who’s had a hard relationship with Trump.
Pence defended Trump’s tweet about the Chicago shooting death of basketball star Dwyane Wade’s cousin, immediately linking that death to electoral concerns. “Every time an African-American citizen, or any citizen, loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated”, he said.
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“In this task, we will always err on the side of protecting the American people – we will use immigration law to prevent crimes, and will not wait until some innocent American has been harmed or killed before taking action”, he said.
