[1/2]Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, U.S., November 11, 2023. REUTERS/Brian Snyder License Rights Acquire
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Donald Trump, if re-elected in 2024, would expand his first-time immigration crackdown to include vast gatherings of people who would be held in large camps to await deportation, New York Times reported Saturday.
The report was based on interviews with several advisers, including Stephen Miller, who oversaw Trump’s first-term immigration policy, the Times said.
It described Trump’s plans as “an attack on immigration on a scale not seen in modern American history” and said it aimed to deport millions of people each year, including those who have lived in the US for decades .
Trump is the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and is likely to face US President Joe Biden in a rematch of their 2020 contest.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment.
The Biden-Harris campaign, in a statement, called Trump’s immigration plans “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that are “intended to instill fear and divide us, and bet that a scared nation is how he wins this election.”
Among other measures, Trump would revive his ban on the entry of people from certain Muslim-majority countries, the paper said.
He would revive other tough policies, including a COVID-19-era rejection of asylum applications, although this time the rejections would be based on allegations that migrants carry other infectious diseases, it continued.
Trump is seeking to expedite deportations through a massive expansion of a form of removal that does not require a fair hearing, the paper said.
To help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a sweeping roundup of undocumented people, Trump would redeploy federal agents and deputies to local police and National Guard troops voluntarily by Republican-governed states, the report said.
He would ease the strain on ICE detention facilities by building huge camps to hold detainees while their cases are processed while they await deportation.
To guarantee the massive operation if Congress refused, Trump would divert Pentagon funds, as he did with his border wall in his first term, the Times said.
Trump hinted at his plan at a September rally in Iowa, said the newspaper, which quoted him as saying he would conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” along the lines of the “Eisenhower model.”
It was a 1954 campaign named after an ethnic effort—Operation Wetback—to detain and deport Mexican immigrants.
Other parts of Trump’s plan call for screening visa applicants for ideological views, revoking the temporary protected status of people from certain countries deemed unsafe and attempts to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents, the newspaper said .
Reporting by Jonathan Landay; additional reporting by Andrea Shallal; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Alistair Bell
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