Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S., August 18, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:06 pm
It’s Sunday, time for Donald Trump surrogates to flood the airwaves to dodge questions about Donald Trump’s vacillating immigration policy. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway claimed there is no mechanism for Trump’s immigration policy while Mike Pence explained that there is no policy, it’s a mechanism. Yikes.
On Face the Nation, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway couldn’t explain how the undocumented immigrants would actually leave the country. Sopan Deb tweeted, “Conway asked how undocumented immigrants would leave: ‘…that’s really the question here, John.’ (Yes. Yes it is.)”
Video:
So, there is no mechanism.
But over on State of the Union, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence got out of explaining Trump’s policy of mass deportations by claiming it was a mechanism, not a policy:
Pence gets points for distraction technique, but taken as a whole in terms of Trump responses, it’s clear the campaign has messaging problems.
Remember, we started with building the wall, making Mexico pay for it, and Donald Trump as one-man boy wonder John Wayne going after all “Mexicans” because they are “rapists”, etc. Then the Republican establishment saw how Trump’s anti-Hispanic rhetoric was turning formerly red states into possible purples and they put their foot down. Trump must pretend to be compassionate or else.
So we got Trump the Compassionate for a day.
Then Saturday we took another hard turn back to Visions of a SuperHero Policies, with Trump promising that within his first hour of being President, the deportations would begin.
Trump’s “immigration” policy is neither a policy nor a mechanism, for many reasons. It’s not a policy because it’s so unrealistic and his claim that Mexico would pay for it is unlikely. So it’s more of a bedtime fairy tale for conservatives than a policy.
Trump’s policy is also not a mechanism because they don’t even know how they would implement the most basic part of the “policy” — that is, how they would deport people.
The biggest irony here is that when called out for these logic fails, Trump surrogates like to claim that no one is enforcing our laws currently. They claim we have “open borders”. We do not have open borders. President Obama does enforce the law and he chooses to focus it on dangerous criminals instead of deporting DREAMers. Because logic and compassion.
Republicans are reacting oddly to President Obama’s 2011 policy of prioritizing the deportation of criminals who are here illegally. It makes sense to focus our limited resources (yes, it costs money) on those who have committed crimes, and that’s what Obama has done. Which is sort of the opposite of the Trump vision that Obama is doing nothing to enforce the law and not focusing on law and order.
This old canard bandied about by Republicans was ironically used by Trump foe Ted Cruz in the GOP primary, who used fudged numbers to make his inaccurate point that Obama was releasing “criminal illegal aliens”.
Here’s an awkward endorsement of Obama’s enforcement: Even “immigration policy expert with the libertarian Cato Institute” Alex Nowrasteh told PolitiFact that the Secure Communities program, which focuses on deporting dangerous criminals, is “the most effective immigration enforcement tool to date” and “was used in about 3 percent of U.S. jurisdictions when Obama took office and is in about 97 percent today.”
So Obama is doing more to focus on enforcing the deportation of dangerous criminals. Huh.
Don’t expect such sensible policies from Donald Trump, who can’t even articulate what his policy is and whose surrogates are now denying his policy on one network while on another they can’t explain how it would be implemented.
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