Former President Donald Trump vowed to expand his travel ban and initiate the “largest domestic deportation operation” in United States history if he wins a second term in the White House.
Trump outlined his policies to secure the U.S. southern border during a speech Wednesday in Iowa. The former president and GOP frontrunner blasted President Joe Biden’s record on the border and called on congressional Republicans to take action to stop his policies, vowing that each of Biden’s “open borders” policies would be terminated by Trump “immediately” upon returning to Washington.
“I will immediately terminate every open borders policy of the Biden administration and follow the Dwight D. Eisenhower model,” Trump said in Dubuque, Iowa. “We’ll carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
The former president said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove known and suspected gang members, saying that the U.S. has “tremendous” numbers of drug dealers and cartel members from the “worst gangs” in the world, including MS-13. “We took them out by the thousands, thousands and thousands of people we took out, and then the election got rigged,” Trump said of his first term.
President Trump: "We'll carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. I'll also invoke immediately the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members." pic.twitter.com/BnwIbFJobZ
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) September 20, 2023
The former president also said part of his plan includes directing troops, as well as law enforcement officers from the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS to enforce the laws at the border.
“I’ll make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas, guarding other people’s borders,” Trump told the crowd. “We guard other people’s borders, but we don’t guard our own.”
Congressional Republicans have a role to play right now, according to Trump, as Biden’s border policies have ushered in record numbers of illegal immigrant crossings at the border. “I’m calling on congressional Republicans to ban Joe Biden from using a single taxpayer dollar to release or resettle illegal aliens into the United States, effective September 30,” he said, telling Republicans to “get tougher” to tackle immigration.
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According to Fox News, just in the past five days, 45,000 illegal immigrants were intercepted at the southern border. In August, sources told the outlet that 230,000 illegal immigrants were encountered at the border, though Border Patrol has yet to release official numbers. If confirmed, that would be the most border crossings in a single month in 2023 so far, the outlet notes.
Trump also told Iowans he wanted to bring back – and even expand – his travel ban, which, after multiple revisions, limited visas from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela, Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Sudan. The former president touted the ban in his speech, saying, “We didn’t have problems. We were very tough.” After taking office, Biden reversed the ban and called it “discriminatory.”
“I will bring back the travel ban and expand it even further to keep Radical Islamic Terrorists out of our country,” Trump said. “I will also use existing federal law to deny entry to all communists and Marxists to the United States. Those who join our country must love our country—and we are going to keep foreign Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists the hell out of America.”
Trump currently leads the Republican field by nearly 50 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And in Iowa, he leads his next closest challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by 34 percentage points. Recent general election polls also show the former president performing well against Biden in a hypothetical rematch, where he leads 45.1% to 44.6% nationally, according to the RCP average.