In the afternoon, the Republican presidential candidate met with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, presenting a diplomatic, nearly pleasant demeanor. The summit, which brings together Republicans from across the West, runs through Sunday.
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Speaking to a charged audience at the convention centre in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, hours after his visit to Mexico, Trump said once in the office, he would built the lovely wall up the cost (US$10-15 billion) will be paid by Mexico.
Immigration policy experts from both parties have routinely said that deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country is a completely unrealistic endeavor.
The reason that Trump chose to make this change?
Audio for this story will be available after noon Thursday.
Although there’s some fair criticism of the strategy the Clinton campaign is employing also which is, “Let Trump make the mistakes”. “Not going to work that way”, Trump said.
As recently as Monday, he said, the GOP presidential nominee had signaled on a conference call with faith leaders that they could expect to see a gentler, more compassionate Trump in the speech. His tough talk is backed by a package of policies that would end sanctuary cities, revise our antiquated visa system, swiftly deport illegal immigrants who are criminals, increase the number of border agents and ICE deportation officers, and build that wall.
“I was very clear – in private and in public – in stressing that in Mexico we feel offended and hurt by his pronouncements about Mexicans”, Pena Nieto wrote in a piece in the newspaper El Universal on Thursday entitled “Why did I meet Donald Trump?”.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Mexican government official said the two men spoke English during the meeting and that Pena Nieto clearly explained to Trump the offence his comments had caused.
In Mexico City, Trump told reporters he and Peña Nieto did not discuss the single most repeated and most outlandish tenet of Trump’s plan: building a wall across the 2,000-mile U.S. -Mexico border.
The Hillary Clinton campaign blasted Trump’s Arizona speech in a written statement and accused Trump of “doubling down on his anti-immigrant rhetoric” and attempt at “demonizing immigrants”.
He spent days floating a series of possible changes and even visited Mexico for a few hours Wednesday in a bid to appear more presidential. But he didn’t say how much, and you can bet it wouldn’t be enough to comply with one especially punishing Republican proposal in the last (failed) immigration bill.
The speech served as a hit for Trump’s base of support. But he quickly said on Twitter that the wall came up, and there was no way Mexico would be paying.
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“You now have roughly 21,000 border patrol agents which is a doubling from the level of the early 2000’s when it was around 10,000”, said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
