Deport them all. That seems to be Donald Trump’s nuanced message. All undocumented immigrants must be deported and any children they had while in the country should be kicked out as well. The contender who leads the polls to be the next Republican presidential candidate says all of the Obama’s executive orders on immigration should be rescinded and “birthright citizenship” should no longer be legal.
“We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press. What about the kids who have lived their whole lives in the United States and have nowhere to go? “They have to go,” he said. “We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don’t have a country.”
And a key part of getting a country? Making sure all the people who were brought to the United States illegally as children no longer have protection from deportation. Most controversial of all though is the idea that native-born children of immigrants should not automatically be considered American citizens, which would require a change in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution that has been in place since 1868.
He is a bit benevolent though. Trump emphasized that families with children born in the United States would be allowed to quickly return—as long as the government thinks they’re worthy. “We’re going to try and bring them back rapidly, the good ones,” he said. “The good people can come back.”
The Trump campaign put pen to paper on Sunday releasing a full policy paper on immigration that lays out how the real estate mogul plans to get Mexico to pay for a border fence.
