Senator Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) questioned if deporting everyone in the United States illegally was “realistic” Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Host Kristen Welker said, “Let’s talk about the Republicans’ agenda. When I spoke to President-elect Donald Trump he said his mass deportation plan was his top priority. He wants to deport everyone who is here illegally. Do you support that plan to deport everyone who is here illegally?”
Thune said, “Well I think certainly there are categories, people who have committed crimes. There are over a million people that the current administration had targeted for deportation. So I think that we have to take seriously the fact that there are a lot of people in this country today, over 10 million who came in over the last four years under the current administration’s policies, and many of whom are not here for good reasons. We know we apprehended people on the terrorist border on the watch list, and you have gang members and cartel members and all of the above. As we think about what those next steps are and, the first thing is securing that border and making sure that we change the incentive struck are so people are incentivized to come here illegally which they have been for the last four years. And do everything to ensure that the border personnel, the ICE agents and border agents have the resources that they need to do their job. Some of that means physical barriers, some of it is technological barriers, et cetera, and those will require resources, and some will require deportation of certain people who are here illegally.”
Welker said, “In 2016, you said deporting everyone here illegally was not realistic. Have you changed your mind?”
Thune said, “Again, I think you start, this will be, obviously, a process, and it will take resources obviously to get people to leave the country. We’ll have to make sure the administration has the resources they need to enable them to do that. Is it realistic to deport everybody? I mean, there are a lot of people in this country who are here illegally, but I think they have identified already, and anybody who has committed a crime in the country ought to be on the list, and there are about a million, 1.4 million, I think, on the current administration’s list of people that need to be deported. So start with that, and then we will go from there, and we’ll figure it out. I think the administration, when they take office, these are decisions that obviously that they’ll have to make.”
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