North Carolina, United States.- Former US President Donald Trump, who has made anti-immigrant rhetoric a key element of his presidential campaign, warned on Wednesday that if he wins the November election he will expel hundreds of thousands of migrants who have entered the country under two key programs of President Joe Biden’s administration.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump lashed out at two immigration programs created by the Biden administration to discourage migrants from arriving directly at the U.S. southern border seeking asylum in order to reduce chaos in the region.
Trump said he would force more than a million people who have entered the United States under the two programs to leave the country. “Get ready to leave because they will be leaving here very quickly,” he said.
Trump has already promised a crackdown on migrants if he wins the presidential election, including a promise of mass deportations. He made similar promises in previous election campaigns, but deportations under his administration never topped 350,000.
Under a Biden administration program, migrants at Mexico’s southern border can use a smartphone app called CBP One to schedule an appointment with U.S. authorities and apply for asylum at an official U.S. border crossing. So far, 813,000 migrants have used the system since it went into effect in January 2023. Separately, the U.S. government last year launched a program that allows 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to come to the United States each month if they have a financial sponsor, pass a background check and buy a plane ticket to a U.S. airport instead of the southern U.S. border. About 530,000 people have come to the United States under that program. Migrants under both programs enter the country on two-year humanitarian-related stay permits. The Biden administration has promoted both policies as strategies to reduce chaos at the U.S. southern border, crack down on human trafficking networks and ensure that migrants are vetted before they enter the country. But Republicans say both programs are essentially a way to circumvent the nation’s immigration laws, set by Congress, and that the Biden administration is admitting people who would otherwise be ineligible to enter the U.S. Republican-run states have filed lawsuits to stop both policies. After his earlier promises to deport migrants en masse, Trump and his chief immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, have provided more details about how they plan to carry them out in a second term in the White House, including invoking war powers, relying on friendly governors and using the military. But any such large-scale deportation plan is likely to run into legal, logistical and financial problems.
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