Buyer Beware: 11 Million Reasons for Conservatives to Rethink Trump

Over the last 10 months the Conservative Base of Republican voters have been split into two distinct camps: Pro-Trump and Stop-Trump. The majority of Pro-Trump conservatives first gravitated towards his candidacy based on his bold declarations regarding our illegal immigration dilemma. Trump initially took ahardline stance on the issue while conjuring images of the very effective policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. With talk of buses full of rounded up illegals, proclamations of a Mexican funded border wall and anti-illegal immigration rhetoric in tow, many were sold on the idea of a Donald Trump presidency.

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With conservatives, Trump has been riding the wave of this characterization as being seemingly the strongest on the issue ever since. This is politics however and like many campaign trail promulgations, when pressed on specifics later in the campaign his Clintonian ability to reverse course in a moment’s notice led to him stating it’s “unrealistic and inhumane to attempt to deport all of them.” While this was to the contrary of his previous brash and unapologetic position on the matter it amazingly did not seem to affect his standing with most of his newfound conservative constituency.

The illegal immigration issue was particularly damaging to the candidacy of Senator Marco Rubio based on the perception that he was pro-Amnesty. Conservatives chased him out of the primary and have primarily pledged their support to either Trump or Senator Ted Cruz.

With that said, and with Trumps own website offering a short 56 second video on the matter I have put together based on his own words what I believePresident Donald J. Trumps deportation and legalization plans would look like in practical application. For the purpose of this exercise I will be using the figure of 11.3 million illegals in the US in 2014 calculated by the Pew Research Center.

Trump has clearly stated:

“I would get people out and then have an expedited way of getting them back into the country so they can be legal…. A lot of these people are helping us … and sometimes it’s jobs a citizen of the United States doesn’t want to do. I want to move ’em out, and we’re going to move ’em back in and let them be legal.” Trump to CNN’s Dana Bash July 29th 2015

“When we have some good people, we have some very good people here, we have a lot of really good people. They’re illegal. Now, you either have a country or not. We go out, and we’re going to try and bring them back rapidly, the good ones. Rapidly. You know the word ‘expedited’?” Trump to Meet The Press August 16th 2016

We can clearly assume based on those quotations that the Trump plan is for what is commonly referred to as “Touchback” deportation.

The Numbers:

Crime Statistics from the Bureau of Judicial Statistics show that 73,665 inmates in State and Federal prisons were not classified as US citizens. We can assume that after they serve their sentences that they would be deported according to what Trump has previously insinuated as well as current immigration laws. In addition to these criminal aliens according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 949,126 detainer or “immigration hold” requests were issued to local, state and federal law enforcement between Fiscal Year 2008 to Fiscal Year 2012. Out of these requests the number of aliens convicted of crimes was 214,544. We can assume that since 734,582 of these aliens were never convicted of a crime that they would be eligible for legalization.

At least 11 million Illegal immigrants would be granted amnesty or some form of legalization based on what Donald Trump has said in his own words. The 11.3 million number used for this article is considered by many to be a very conservative figure with some estimates like the claim by former Ambassador to the United States from Mexico Arturo Sarukhan that the number is actually 30 million. Sarukhan also told MSNBC “If you were to deport the 30 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, that’s going to cost you about $130 billion” That would be a significant cost to American taxpayers for an effort that ultimately does little to nothing as far as truly solving the problem.

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