President-elect Donald Trump promised on Sunday to deport U.S. citizens as part of his quest to expel all undocumented immigrants, describing them as collateral in his sweeping immigration plans.
Trump told Meet the Press‘ Kristen Welker that he wanted to avoid the family separation scandal that plagued his first administration. But to do so, he said, will require mixed-immigration families—those with undocumented immigrants with children who are U.S. citizens—to leave together.
“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 appeared to acknowledge the policy will prove to be unpopular, but he claimed it was necessary to ensure laws were followed.
“You can always find something out like, you know, ‘This doesn’t work. That doesn’t work,‘” Trump said. “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. Or they want her out and 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. And you have to have a series of standards and a series of laws. And in the end, look, our country is a mess.”
The family-separation policy was implemented by the first Trump administration in 2017, prompting steady waves of backlash and scrutiny for the “zero tolerance” standard. Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan has vowed to reinstate the policy, telling CBS in October that families “can be deported together.” Trump said on Sunday he agreed with Homan.
Trump also promised he would end birthright citizenship on the first day of his administration, saying he would find a way to circumvent the 14th Amendment’s edict that grants citizenship.
“We’re going to have to get it changed,” he said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”
