However, Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters in Arizona later on Wednesday that Mexico would pay for the wall “100 percent”.
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“Clearly they’re stuck in the polls”, says Todd Schulte, president of the Mark Zuckerberg-backed immigration advocacy group FWD.us, “and people are saying to him you can’t run around saying you’re going to deport 11 million people”.
He says immigration as a whole should be limited so that only the people who love our country and can support themselves in the USA are allowed in.
Asserting that he will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, Trump said the “time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system in order to achieve the goals to keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms”. “And Mexico will pay for the wall”, Trump said.
Ron Elving, NPR senior Washington editor and correspondent.
PolitiFact is fact-checking several claims from Trump’s speech, some of which cover familiar territory.
Donald Trump is continuing his tough talk on immigration, saying that anyone who entered the country illegally “will be subject to deportation” if he’s elected president. Since 2014, the Obama administration has focused on deporting recent arrivals and criminals. It was as if Trump wanted to outdo the Democratic Convention speech that featured the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in the Iraq War and dare the news media to demonize these parents even after they excoriated him for demonizing the Muslim parents. As a conservative who has forever longed for a Republican candidate who processed this incredible talent, it is particularly frustrating that when it finally happens it is in a year when we got duped into nominating an unqualified Democrat.
Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on illegal immigration has obscured a potentially historic policy shift – the Republican presidential nominee is the first major party candidate in modern memory to propose limiting legal immigration. “We’ve got a lot of people in this country that you can’t have, and those people you can’t have”, Trump said.
Those who want to limit migration say the concern is economic, not racial.
“I was under the impression, that I think all Latino leaders were given, that he was going to deal with the undocumented in a compassionate, humane way”, Aguilar, who is the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and former chief of the Office of Citizenship under President George W. Bush, told USA TODAY.
Video-Trump says he’ll create “deportation task force” w/in ICE. According to the Mexican government, the border wall did come up, and it was made expressly clear that they would never, ever, ever pay for it. Donald Trump came back, told a different story, said they didn’t even mention the wall, but that’s not the important part of the story.
Few political onlookers, from his fans on the far right to the Hispanic advisers on his campaign, seemed to expect that Trump would happily re-embrace his harshest positions on illegal immigration Wednesday night.
But the big question entering Wednesday night’s speech was whether he’d stand by his calls for mass deportations – including families that hadn’t violated additional laws. We didn’t discuss payment of the wall. He, too, said Trump had signaled a willingness to moderate some of his immigration plans, including limiting his call for deportations to those convicted of crimes.
The speech drew criticism from some of Trump’s Hispanic supporters, including those who attended an August 20 meeting in which Trump said he wanted a “humane” approach to dealing with undocumented Americans.
But Trump’s speech drew praise from advocates of less immigration or more enforcement. He said the US will be “moving them out on Day One”.
“This is an insult and a betrayal”, said artist Arturo Meade as he joined a protest against Wednesday’s meeting in Mexico City.
The scope of the problem is vast – and not one that Trump’s proposed border wall could fix.
The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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The Republican presidential nominee has made the wall – and Mexico paying for it – a core element in his campaign.
