Trump’s immigration plan faces backlash for forced exile of American citizen children | Opinion
If Donald Trump wins the presidency, 5% of the U.S. population will face an administration whose top advisors on immigration don’t blink at the idea of deporting a million undocumented immigrants a year from the interior of the United States at a cost of as much as $80 billion a year.
That’s what Tom Homan, the man who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of the Trump administration, and who is cited by Trump as the man he wants to lead the deportation effort, told TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes earlier this week.
Almost instantly in the press and online there was a backlash to one of his ideas. A new Trump administration, he says, is planning to deport the American citizen children of undocumented immigrants right along with their parents in order to avoid separating families.
CNN political analyst and longtime Los Angeles Times reporter Ronald Brownstein called the plan “ethnic cleansing” in an X post that was retweeted more than 6,000 times. A Georgetown law professor wrote we would be forcing kids into “exile.” In prime time, MSNBC called it “chilling.”
Mother Jones is outraged. “What he’s confirming is that every hateful word spewed at Trump’s fascist rally is in earnest — with a policy proposal to back it up,” blared The New Republic.
What’s clear is that if Trump is elected, the 4 million American-born children of America’s 20 million undocumented immigrants will be at the center of the political debate. One side will be arguing to keep the families in the U.S. while the other says ship them to the parents’ home.
What’s ironic is that just a decade ago — when Trump was first running for president and using the disparaging term “anchor babies” — this whole debate was deemed a myth by the press, fact-checkers and immigration activists alike.
Politifact checked whether it was “such a big phenomenon” concluding the claim was “half-true” because we can’t read the minds of mothers who come here and give birth. Maybe it is just a coincidence that their children are born here.
Vox ran a column by an undocumented immigrant from Europe saying whoops, her baby was an accident and in the headline said “Anchor babies are a myth.” Deep inside the article it admitted that tens of thousands of rich women from all over the world come to the United States every year specifically to have their children born as U.S. citizens by birth.
Forbes, too, said “Myth.” The Washington Post did, too. Georgetown Law School agreed. Human Rights Watch said the same thing.
Who knows, maybe at the time all those experts were right. Maybe immigration judges were fine with sending Mexican moms home to Yucatan without their American babies, coldly splitting up the families or like Nazis out to ethnically cleanse America, the judges sent the kids into exile with their moms. I doubt it — for certainly immigration-friendly liberals would have been screaming like they are now.
But now — now the children of undocumented immigrants are moving to the center of our debate about what to do about our unregulated immigration problem, just like the kids who were brought here as children took center stage in the Obama administration now known as the DACA kids.
For me, I am on the side of keeping the kids and their parents here. But I sure understand how Trump and his followers would feel that they’ve gotten the bait and switch: First, in 2015, the problem is imaginary —nobody is letting the undocumented parents of American citizen children stay in the United States — and then when they try to solve it starting in 2025, suddenly everybody says, of course, we have to let the undocumented parents of American citizen children stay here.
Donald Trump can’t win. It can’t be true that he is making a problem up and that he is a fascist for trying to solve it. His liberal opponents need to pick one.
