Later this week, Univision News reports, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will disavow his primary campaign promise to deport millions of illegal aliens. In place of the hardline immigration stance, Trump may be readying a new promise of completely legal status for millions of immigrants who have illegally entered and worked in the United States.
Trump previewed the radical about-face during a meeting with Hispanic political leaders at Trump Tower in New York City on Saturday.
Details remain scant but comments by attendees at the meeting suggest Trump’s plan will resemble a standard-issue amnesty. Illegal immigrants can stay as long as their criminal histories are relatively clean and as long as they have managed to evade immigration authorities for some period of time.
“Being eligible will require that people haven’t committed serious crimes or aren’t recently arrived,” Texas immigration attorney Jacob Monty, a meeting attendee, told Univision.
One attendee said Trump explained that he doesn’t want to inconvenience illegal immigrants by making them go back to their countries of origin to obtain paperwork.
“Trump himself mentioned a possible solution: Let them do it at the embassies or consulates of their countries,” Lola Zinke, the wife of Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, told Univision.
“He understands Hispanic values and the contributions of our community,” Zinke added.
“Trump acknowledged that there is a big problem with the 11 million people who are here, and that deporting them is neither possible nor humane,” Texas immigration attorney Jacob Monty, a meeting attendee, told Univision.
The status Trump will offer illegal immigrants “wouldn’t be citizenship but would allow them to be here without fear of deportation,” Monty added.
During his campaign kickoff speech this summer, Trump decried U.S. immigration policy, saying that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime.”
“They’re rapists,” Trump continued, adding that “some, I assume, are good people.”
Later in the summer, Trump added that Mexican immigrants spread “tremendous infectious disease.”
At this weekend’s meeting at Trump Tower, attendees said, Trump declared that he now regrets generalizing Latino immigrants as drug-bringing criminal rapists who spread disease.
Everyone took his previous comments the totally wrong way, Trump explained.
“He told us that what he’d said was one thing and what he’d meant to say was another,” meeting attendee Jovita Carranza, deputy administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush, told Univision.
“What he meant to say is that there’s a lot of crime involved in these difficult situations that Hispanics go through on the border,” Carranza said.
The 90-minute meeting was attended by Steve Bannon, a Breitbart News executive who is the Trump campaign’s latest leader, and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who recently joined the campaign.
On Sunday, Conway went on CNN to announce that Trump is having second thoughts about his pledge to deport upwards of 11 million illegal aliens. Trump’s actual immigration stance is now “to be determined,” she said. (RELATED VIDEO: Trump Campaign Manager On If He’ll Keep Deportation Pledge — ‘To Be Determined’)
Amanda Rentería, the national political director for the Hillary Clinton campaign, suggested that Trump’s newest stance on illegal immigration is a stunt to win votes.
“If true, this is a cynical attempt from Donald Trump to distract from his dangerous policies that he doubled down on just this week in a new ad,” Rentería told Univision. “Donald Trump will be Donald Trump and what’s clear is that he’s dangerous for the Latino community.”
Trump, 70, has a long history of disloyalty to both major parties and flip-flopping with the political winds on various issues. (RELATED: From Immigration To Guns To Abortion, Donald Trump Must Reckon With His Progressive History)
Just four years before making severe immigration restrictions the centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump suggested that hostility toward illegal immigrants partially cost Romney the presidency.
U.S. immigration policy must “take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” the septuagenarian billionaire told journalist Ronald Kessler. (RELATED: FLASHBACK: Trump Bashed Romney For Being ‘Mean-Spirited’ On Illegal Immigration After 2012 Election)
“Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” Trump said in 2012.
Romney was particularly to blame, the real estate and casino mogul charged.
“He had a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal,” Trump told Kessler. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote.”
In 2011, Trump suggested that the way to deal with America’s 11 to 15 million illegal immigrants is on a case-by-case basis. “You know, it’s hard to generalize,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly. “You’re going to have to look at the individual people.” He added that determining citizenship for 15 million people is “going to take a long time and a lot of people.”
In mid-August, Trump released an immigration plan. It calls for an end to birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and “a wall across the southern border.” He wants Mexico to pay for the wall. He also wants to triple the number of immigration enforcement officials, to defund sanctuary cities and to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
“If somebody’s been outstanding, we try and work something out,” Trump explained in July 2015, a day after a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 1999, Trump said he supported stringent restrictions on immigration. “I think that too many people are flowing into the country,” he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press then.
Thus, Trump was a strong immigration opponent in 1999 but a strong proponent of a generous pathway to legal status in 2011 and 2012. By 2015, he had switched to staunch opposition to illegal immigration.
According to Univision, he is preparing to pivot once more.
As a real estate developer, Trump has demonstrated no commitment to limiting immigration. Records show that he has consistently hired both low-skill legal immigrants and low-paid illegal immigrants.
According to an August 2015 analysis by Reuters, the billionaire businessman’s various companies have imported at least 1,100 foreign workers since 2000. Since 2006, Trump’s genteel, 62,000-square-foot Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Fla. (which charges $100,000 for membership privileges alone) has sought to import 787 foreign laborers.
During the last 30 years, Trump has employed illegal aliens for his multitude of construction projects — at rates as low as $5 per hour, according to testimony in a federal lawsuit.
A worker at the construction site of the posh, soon-to-be-opened $200 million Trump International Hotel near the White House in Washington, D.C., has claimed that Trump currently employs many illegal immigrants as laborers. “The majority of us are Hispanics, many who came illegally,” a stone mason working on the hotel told The Washington Post — in Spanish — in July 2015.
In November 2015, Trump called for a “deportation force” to remove the illegal immigrants currently living and working in the United States. (RELATED: Trump Calls For ‘Deportation Force’ To Remove Illegal Immigrants ‘Humanely’)
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