Politics

The Big Change in Donald Trump's Immigration Plan

September 1st 2016

After a last-minute trip to Mexico on Wednesday morning, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took the stage at Arizona's Phoenix Convention Center to deliver a much-anticipated speech on immigration.

donald-trumpAP/Dario Lopez-Mills - apimages.com

Delivered as a 10 point plan, most of Trump's address traversed familiar territory — build a wall, make Mexico foot the bill, send the "bad ones" back home, bring jobs back to American workers. But Trump proposed one particularly unsettling new policy: deporting all undocumented immigrants arrested of crimes.

Trump's proposition would deprive these individuals of their constitutional right to due process — ie. a fair trial.

Over the years, various conservative radio and TV personalities have argued that illegal immigrants should be denied this 14th Amendment right, the Hill explains. But the Supreme Court has long upheld that "innocent until proven guilty" also applies to aliens living unlawfully in the United States.

Trump's proposal — though itself alarming — provides a glimpse into the larger tone and message of the speech, which presented an increasingly militarized picture of "law and order," which according to a strongly-worded piece from the New York Times editorial board, published after the speech, was fitting for the backdrop of Arizona: a state that has strict immigration laws.

"Which is what makes Mr. Trump’s decision to speak in Phoenix so perversely appropriate. While Mr. Trump’s plans for a locked-down deportation nation are largely a nativist fantasy, immigrant communities in Arizona have lived with the reality of what the Trump vision leads to: the brutal racial profiling and policing abuses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a staunch Trump ally, who echoes and inspires Mr. Trump’s vicious talk about immigrants as criminals. As Sheriff Arpaio seeks a seventh term this fall, his opponents are pushing back, with protests and get-out-the-vote campaigns, to stop the sheriff’s re-election."

“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” Trump said.

“There will be no amnesty," he added.

He also said he would deport two million illegal immigrants convicted of crimes during his first hour in office.

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