Donald Trump’s planned first-day crackdown on illegal immigration would undoubtedly snare U.S. citizens, and that’s just fine by Trump.
In a chat with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president-elect saw no reason why something like citizenship should get in the way of his mass deportation scheme.
When interviewer Kristen Welker asked the president how he planned to deal with families with mixed immigration statuses, Trump said that he would “keep them together,” provided they all chose to leave the country.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” he said.
Trump also refused to acknowledge that forced deportation of legal residents of the U.S. could be horrible on its face. He said that any outrage around the program would be the result of media manipulation and ginned-up controversy.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to be horrible, 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 taken out,” he said. “Your cameras are focused on her as she’s crying as she’s being taken out of our country. And then the public turns against us. But we have to do our job.”
Trump also said he’s looking to end birthright citizenship, as it complicates his deportation schemes for people who immigrated illegally and then had children.
“We have to end it,” he said of the right protected under the 14th Amendment.
Watch the entire interview below:
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