Updated March 3, 2024
This is the third in series of blogs covering Donald Trump's statements and behaviors before, during, and after serving as President. The focus of this post is on Trump and Immigration,
Vote4Change strives to provide relevant and accurate information to help Americans to cast informed votes that can make a difference. Information provided in this blog contains hyperlinks to all media sources quoted.
Compare and contrast, Vote4Change has found no citations of extreme immigration plans or measures attributed to the Biden Administration, or by Joe Biden prior to becoming the 46th President.
Vote4Change acknowledges that the current US immigration system is broken and is in need of a complete overhaul requiring both the democratic and the republican parties to equally enter into good faith negotiations.
Immigration Election Politics
Just as the country was hopeful government was working again, Trump urged Republicans to vote against a bipartisan bill before it was unveiled last Sunday, arguing its passage would be a political victory for President Biden. Trump called on GOP lawmakers to reject any deal that didn’t give them “everything” they wanted. Truth be told, immigration is Trump's marquee issue, which he campaigned on heavily in 2016 and 2020 and will push even harder in 2024.
During the bipartisan Senate negotiations on an immigration reform bill, Mitt Romney, one of the most outspoken critics of Trump shared . “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’” Mitch McConnell in typical fashion initially supported the bill only to succumb to pressure from Trump, flipped positions giving his caucus a green light to vote against the bill. All the while Speaker Johnson, after a trip to Mar-a-Lago, held firm stating the bill was dead on arrival, despite previously stating the House would not consider an Israel/Ukraine funding package without immigration reform included.
At the Southern boarder Biden said in a statement on Friday March 1, 2024.“Let’s be clear,” “What’s been negotiated would — if passed into law — be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country. It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
While campaigning in North Carolina on March 2, 2024, Trump ratcheted up on typical baseless claims “every day Joe Biden is giving aid and comfort to foreign enemies of the United States.” He continued “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he went on to say in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.” Similar claims have argued the democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to weaken the power of white voters, a conspiracy theory once limited far right. Trump's rhetoric while stumping later in Virginia legitimizes “They’re trying to sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.”
What we know about Trump 2025 if re-elected
Mr. Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Mr. Miller said.
Trump has repeatedly declines to rule out reviving the Child separation policy he had previously used while in office.
Plans to Attack Mexico
Rolling Stone article on March 29, 2023, by ASAWIN SUEBSAENG, ADAM RAWNSLEY cites a Trump inside aide stating “‘Attacking Mexico,’ or whatever you’d like to call it, is something that President Trump has said he wants ‘battle plans’ drawn for,” says one of the sources. “He’s complained about missed opportunities of his first term, and there are a lot of people around him who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”
Keeping "people" out
Mr. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically bar visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries
Largest Mass Deportation
Trump allies are planning to expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies undocumented immigrants the usual hearings and opportunity to file appeals, which can take months or years. Trump had tried this while in office but the courts blocked it
Mr. Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”
The new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.
To handle the increase number of deportation, Trump plans to build vast holding facilities and staging centers, constructed by the military, built on open land in Texas, to be run by Homeland security.
Trump plans to reverse the Flores settlement, which prevents the federal government to hold children indefinitely.
Lastly Trump 2025 plans to call on the Insurrection Act, to bypass the Posse Comintatus Act, that forbids the use of military for law enforcement on the boarder.
According to Stephen Miller, "Bottom Line" Miller says "President Trump will do whatever it takes"
More from the 2024 Campaign Trail
December 2023 [independent]
Speaking on stage in New Hampshire, Mr Trump said: “They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries we think about.
“But all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia.”
Trump reserved his most offensive language for undocumented immigrants. During the 2016 campaign, he referred to them as “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “rapists.” From the Oval Office, he referred to them as “animals,” and in a 2018 tweet he said that Democrats wanted them “to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.”
Oct 7, 2023
“We’re going to have the largest deportation operation in history,” Trump said to loud applause during a Saturday campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa.
"Upon my inauguration I will immediately terminate every open borders policy of the Biden administration," Trump said at a rally in Dubuque. "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."
Trump on Immigration while in office
Child Separation
Trump cheered on as Immigration and Customs Enforcement took at least 1,700 children from their parents and put them behind fences.
The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation
Much of Trump’s lying was clumsy, half-baked. Some of it was almost art. Here’s what he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: “You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it.”
Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy. What he did not mention to Todd is that what he had ended was his own policy – a plan announced by his own attorney general that had made family separation standard rather than occasional, as it had been under Obama.
All of Trump’s words in those two sentences to Todd were accurate in themselves. But he was lying because of what he left out.
Southern Boarder Wall
“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I'll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border,” Trump said, announcing his bid for the White House in June 2015.
“Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises, and today we celebrated extraordinary milestone, the completion of the promised 450 miles of border wall,” Trump said in Alamo, Texas on Tuesday, surveying a half-mile stretch of new border wall. “Nobody realizes how big that is.”
Trump's Promises on Building the Wall
Promise: 1,000 miles of wall. Status: Not kept.
"Built" 450 miles of which ONLY 45 miles were new
Promise: The wall would cost $8-$12 billion, and Mexico would pay for it.
Status: $15 billion, and U.S. taxpayers paid for it.
Mexico did not pay for the wall; its leaders have refused since Trump first made his promise.
When asked on ITV what his message was to the British Muslim protests following the Brussels terrorist attack, March 23, 2016
They are absolutely not reporting it “When they see trouble they have to report it, they are not reporting it, they are absolutely not reporting it and that's a big problem. … It's like they're protecting each other but they're really doing very bad damage. And they have to open up to society, they have to report the bad ones."
Protestors gather at New York City's JFK International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in support of newly banned refugees and visitors wishing to enter the country.
On Jan. 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily banned any refugees from entering the U.S., indefinitely banned refugees who hail from Syria and temporarily banned citizens from several Muslim countries from entering the U.S.
The order also required a "religious test" of sorts for refugees attempting to enter the U.S., giving preferential treatment to Christian and other religious minorities who live in Muslim countries over Muslims.
The order, called the "Muslim ban" by Trump's critics, outraged many and caused bottlenecks at major U.S. airports as stranded travelers filed for emergency appeals. The ACLU and others have fought the order in court since it was first introduced, though in 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a third version of the ban signed by Trump
More coverage on the Muslim Ban
With the country rattled by the San Bernardino shooting in which a Muslim husband and wife massacred 14 and wounded 21 others, Trump’s came out on Monday with a doozy of a statement, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.
”While the proposal triggered condemnation from most candidates in both parties, Trump said it was necessary to protect the homeland.
“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine,” he said in a statement released through his campaign. “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again.”
One of Trump’s first firings (setting the tone for a presidential term that would see one of the highest staff turnovers ever) was Sally Yates. The then-acting US attorney general refused to enforce his first Muslim ban.
So she was sacked for “betraying” the department.
Trump was absolutely right to call out Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for their anti-Semitism — including the charge that Israel’s supporters in Congress are disloyal to the United States. But then Trump declared that “any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat” show “great disloyalty” — using the very same anti-Semitic trope that got Omar and Tlaib in trouble in the first place.
Trump removed protection status from 59,000 Haitians, forcing them to return to disaster-ridden Haiti by July 2019
In November 2017, Trump ended a humanitarian program that had allowed 59,000 Haitians to reside and work in the U.S, as the country still tries to recover from 2010’s devastating earthquake, which ripped through its social fabric.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; money sent back home from ex-pats is a lifeline.
Worse still, in 2020, the forced deportations of Haitians continued during the pandemic, despite human rights activists warning that Trump was essentially “exporting” coronavirus to a nation that would not be able to cope with an outbreak.
This recently finalized rule requires immigration officials to reject applications from immigrants to enter or stay in the U.S. if they have received — or are judged likely to require — any of several public benefits that are tied to need. These include public health services such as Medicaid. The predictable consequence is to discourage immigrant households from accessing such programs even when they’re legally entitled.
As we reported in August 2018, when rumors of the impending rule began circulating, healthcare providers with immigrant clienteles already were seeing a reduction in patients. The director of a clinic in the Latino community of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles told me then that her monthly patient enrollments had fallen by 25% after the public-charge proposal leaked out — on top of a one-third drop after Trump’s election.
Leaving aside the basic cruelty and inhumanity of a rule that instills fear in families, less healthcare for immigrants means a decline in the health profile of the entire community, raising costs for public programs and employers, among many others.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here?”
On ‘s–thole’ countries White House meeting, 11/1/18
Most recently, Trump was widely denounced for his reported comments describing Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations as “s–thole” countries during an immigration meeting last week with lawmakers of both parties.
“Why are we having all these people from s–thole countries come here?” Trump asked, according to people briefed on the meeting who spoke with The Washington Post. He also singled out Haiti, saying, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.” He then went on to suggest that the U.S. instead take in more people from countries like Norway.
Trump’s busy fingers on social media often display that he doesn't really think or check things before he shares them on his official account, which is a worrying thing to consider when you are talking about the US president.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing that Trump has ever shared on his timeline was a series of Islamophobic tweets from the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First back in November 2017.
Trump did later apologize for sharing the tweets, telling Piers Morgan in a television interview that he knew nothing of the group beforehand, adding:
“If you are telling me they're horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologize if you'd like me to do that.”
boards a plane to visit detention centers holding migrant children in McAllen, Texas, on June 21, 2018, wearing a green Zara jacket featuring the words "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" written in graffiti lettering across the back.
Her visit came on the heels of the president's decision to reverse his administration's policy to separate children from their detained parentswho crossed the border into the United States seeking asylum. He'd first signed such his zero-tolerance order that May, resulting in the separation of more than 2,300 children from their parents. (As of October 2020, more than 500 children remained separated from their parents.) Responding to heavy criticism over the jacket four months later, the first lady — whose spokeswoman at first denied the piece was making a statement — said the "I Really Don't Care" message was aimed at the "left-wing media."
From Trump's 2016 Campaign
“Businesses are leaving our country like they’ve never left before. They’re going all over. They’re going to Mexico, that I can tell you. Mexico is like the eighth wonder of the world,” Trump said on Aug. 9.
June 15, 20215 on Mexico Campaign Launch Rally
"They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Trump kicked off his presidential campaign on June 16 from the Trump Tower in Manhattan, and immediately touched off a furor with his comments about immigration.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said at his campaign announcement.
“But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”
June 3, 2016
“I’ve been treated very unfairly by this judge. Now, this judge is of Mexican heritage. I’m building a wall, OK? I’m building a wall. I am going to do very well with the Hispanics, the Mexicans,” Trump said in an interview with CNN on June 3, explaining his attacks on the judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit.
“I think I’m going to do very well with Hispanics. But we’re building a wall. He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico,” Trump said later in the interview, speaking of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents. “This judge is giving us unfair rulings. Now I say why. Well, I want to — I’m building a wall, OK? And it’s a wall between Mexico, not another country.”
May 5, 2016
Just prior to formally announcing his intent to run in 2016; [Time's Magazine Trump Insults Mexico By Katie Reilly]
Trump feuded with former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who compared the Republican presidential candidate to Hitler and said, “I’m not going to pay for that f–king wall.”
Fox later apologized, which Trump said was “very, very nice.”
We have to get our arms around the situation
"It’s temporary, but we have to get our arms around the situation. …We have a problem. I’m not looking to be politically correct. I’m doing this to do the right thing.”
Trump, defending his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, on CNN, Dec. 13, 2015.
Illegals are going drive those cars right over the border
"I mean, the way our country's run, if it doesn't happen to be me that wins, you know what's going to happen? They're going to build a plant and illegals are going drive those cars right over the border. …And they'll probably end up stealing the car."
Trump on Ford's plans to build a new plant in Mexico, Oct. 21, 2015
They say, We want deal!
"When these people walk into the room, they don't say, 'Oh hello, how's the weather? It's so beautiful outside. Isn’t it lovely? How are the Yankees doing? They're doing wonderful, that's great," Trump said, to some laughter from the crowd. "They say, 'We want deal!'"
Trump imitating Asian negotiators during an Iowa speech, Aug. 25, 2015.
Other historical Immigrant Comments
Anti-Muslims Historical statements
“I would do that, absolutely, I think it’s great.”
Trump on whether he would be willing to close some mosques and revoke some passports to fight the Islamic State, on Fox Business Network, Oct. 21, 2015.
September 11th Hannity Oct 20, 2015
"I think I could have stopped it because I have very tough illegal immigration policies, and people aren't coming into this country unless they're vetted and vetted properly."
7/12/15 Muslims
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."
1990 Vanity Fair
He has a long history with undocumented immigrants, whom he recently smeared as “rapists.” When Brenner was reporting the story, Trump was in the middle of a lawsuit about his alleged hiring of undocumented immigrants from Poland, who said they were paid four dollars an hour.
So we ask again..... Is this Presidential?
If votes are not casted for President Biden they could become "presidential" again.
This is the third in a series of articles covering topics to help remind Americans why Trump cannot get a second term.
Topic’s Covered:
~ Immigration Beliefs & Policies [this blog]
Trump Plans for 2025
Child Separation
Southern Boarder Wall
Mexico
Muslim Ban
"S' Hole" Countries
Melania Trump
Haitians
Future Topics: ~ Election Denial / Voting Regulations
~ Narcissism
~ Racism
~ White Supremist / Nationalists
~ Gun Control
~ View of Veterans
~ Military Use
~ Foreign Affairs /Policies
~ Climate Beliefs/Actions
~ Healthcare
~ COVID
~ Abortion & Reproductive Health
~ Women / Sexism
~ LGBTQ+ Rights position
~ Defamation of Others
~ Trump’s 2025 Campaign Agenda