President-elect Donald Trump suggested Sunday he would deport some Americans along with their illegal-migrant kin to keep families together under his mass-deportation plan.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in a pretaped interview. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
Pressed further about children who are here illegally or even legally, Trump said he is inclined to boot them as well as their parents to keep the family unit intact.
“We don’t have to separate families,” Trump said. “We’ll send the whole family very humanely back to the country where they came.”
He said the families will have a say in at least some of the decision-making.
“If they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice: The person that came in illegally can go out or they can all go out together.”
Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, has backed deporting the children of illegal migrants even if the minors were born in the US and thus residing here legally.
Criminals will be first to go
Trump emphasized that “you have no choice” but to round up everyone who has been in the US illegally to deport them and explained that his starting point will be criminals.
“I think you have to do it,” he said. “You have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. The people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been [in] line for 10 years to come into the country.
“We have to get the criminals out of our country,” Trump continued: “But we’re starting with the criminals, and we got to do it. And then we’re starting with others, and we’re going to see how it goes.”
The president-elect argued that voters backed him in large part because of economic issues and the border, while simultaneously acknowledging some of the political repercussions of pursuing his mass-deportation plans.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to be hard — when we take a wonderful young woman who’s with a criminal, and they show the woman and she could stay by the law, but they show the woman being [deported] … and then the public turns against us,” he said.
“But we have to do our job, and you have to have a series of standards and a series of laws.”
During his first administration, Trump faced fierce backlash over some of the hardline immigration policies he implemented, such as the family separation policy his first administration pursued early on.
In some instances, his administration prosecuted adults or held them in deportation facilities while keeping the children under Department of Health and Human Services supervision. During the backlash, his administration backed off the policy and worked toward reunifying families.
Protect the Dreamers
Trump also suggested that he was keen on protecting the so-called Dreamers, individuals who were brought into the US illegally by their parents at a young age and have since grown up here.
“The Dreamers are going to come later, and we have to do something about the Dreamers, because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age, and many of these are middle-aged people now,” Trump said.
“I will work with the Democrats on a plan, and [see] if we can come up with a plan. But the Democrats have made it very, very difficult to do anything. Republicans are very open to the Dreamers.”
Moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump if that means he hopes the Dreamers can stay within the US.
“I do. I want them to work something out,” he explained.
End birthright citizenship
Trump also reiterated his well-worn desire to end birthright citizenship, which stems from the 14th Amendment in the Constitution and ensures individuals born in the US immediately become citizens.
Scores of illegal migrants have engaged in a well-known process of sneaking into the US to have children on American soil so that their offspring can be citizens.
“We have to end it. We’re the only country that has it,” Trump explained of the measure, which he blasted as “ridiculous.”
More than 30 countries have some variation of birthright citizenship, according to an assessment by the Library of Congress.
The incoming president dangled the possibility of attempting to scrap birthright citizenship through executive action.
Trump teased that his team has a flurry of executive actions also ready to go on issues such as the border and the economy.
