President-elect Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, it might be the fate of the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants Trump wants to deport en masse.
Trump reiterated Sunday that his goal is to deport all undocumented immigrants. But an estimated 4.4 million minor children who are citizens live with undocumented parents in the United States. That means a huge portion of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country have minor children who are not legally subject to deportation.
If you follow Trump’s logic, the government would then be returning to — and indeed potentially increasing exponentially — the highly controversial family separation policy that the first Trump administration carried out for border-crossers. That led to an estimated 5,000 children being separated from their parents.
Trump and his incoming administration don’t appear to have a good answer for how they would prevent this — or indeed if they want to.
NBC News’s Kristen Welker pressed Trump on this issue in an interview that aired Sunday, and Trump suggested that the children of undocumented immigrants would be deported, too.
“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,” Trump said.
When Welker noted that the children have U.S. citizenship because they were born here, Trump didn’t back away, either.
“Well, what you’ve got to do if they want to stay with their father — look, we have to have rules and regulations,” Trump said. “You can always find something out like, you know, ‘This doesn’t work. That doesn’t work.’”
The options for the administration are relatively simple: Either you somehow deport U.S. citizens, too, or you separate these families by sending the parents to another country.
Either option is obviously fraught. It’s not at all clear how the former would pass legal muster.
As for the latter, while polls have shown the American people lean in favor of the broad concept of mass deportation, a recent survey showed they opposed it 57 percent to 38 percent if it leads to the separation of families.
Trump’s comments echo those made by his incoming border czar, Tom Homan, in a late October interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”
Homan was asked if there was a way to do mass deportation without separating families, and he responded, “Of course there is: Families can be deported together.
But both Trump’s and Homan’s comments are difficult to square with the other things they have said on the topic.
Fox News host Sean Hannity after the election played a clip of a host on “The View” saying Homan’s plan amounted to deporting citizen children and spouses. He asked directly whether American citizens would be deported, and Homan said, “No, exactly not.”
“They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Homan said.
In another Fox interview a week later, Homan spoke of the claim as if it were ridiculous.
“I heard the other day that we’re going to deport U.S. citizens, too,” he said while rejecting another claim. “I heard that one.”
Trump, too, has said there would actually be some kind of exemption for people in this situation.