Banking on Deportation
Donald Trump wants to deport millions of immigrants. We can stop him by following the money.
Four days is all it took.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly said he’d deport all of the country’s estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants. But in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes the Sunday after the election, he dialed back his rhetoric: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.”
Like much of what Trump says, his plan to deport two to three million people is light on detail, but it appears to be a continuation of immigration policy under the Obama administration. Since 2009, President Obama has deported 2.5 million immigrants, many of whom were “criminals.” He’s relied on Clinton- and Bush-era policies that streamline deportation and empower local law enforcement. While some people have been deported for serious crimes, many have been sent back for merely reentering after being deported in the past, or even for violations as minor as driving without a license or running a red light.