At Monday’s rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump addressed the impact illegal immigration has had on criminality throughout American communities and warned that there are more criminal aliens at-large in the U.S. than the population of any city in New Hampshire.
Trump told his Manchester audience:
Right now, as we speak … we have 179,000 illegal criminal immigrants — illegal criminal — these are people that have been convicted of crimes, some very big crimes. That means that we have 179,000 people here that have committed crimes that shouldn’t be crimes — that shouldn’t be in the country … 179,000 people is bigger than any city, by a lot, in New Hampshire. That’s a massive amount of people.
Indeed, a report issued last week from the Senate Immigration Subcommittee found that “fugitive criminal aliens outnumber populations of all New Hampshire cities.”
For instance, the report notes that New Hampshire’s largest city, Manchester — where Trump’s rally was held tonight — has a population of around 110,000: “The number of at-large criminal aliens ordered removed dwarfs the population [of Manchester] by nearly 70,000.”
The report states:
There are at least 179,027 aliens in the United States who not only have been ordered to leave the country for violating our immigration laws, but who have also been convicted of a criminal offense, and have not left as required or been removed by ICE … While the ICE data includes only criminal aliens who have already been ordered removed, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, estimates there are more than 2 million total criminal aliens in the United States.
Trump continued, explaining to his New Hampshire audience:
We either have a country, folks, or we don’t. Remember this: we either have a country or we don’t. So we’re going to have to take people, we’re going to get rid of those 179 [thousand]. And I don’t want to put them in our jails… Our jails are costing us a fortune… We’re bringing them back where they came from, and let that country put them in prison for the next 25 years, because we’re not doing it. And they’re never, ever coming back to our country again. They are gone. Never.”
In contrast to Trump’s pledge to deport those residing in the country illegally, Marco Rubio co-authored and championed an immigration bill, which, according to immigration law enforcement, would “provide instant legalization and a path to citizenship to gang members and other dangerous criminal aliens.”
At the time, ICE Union president Chris Crane said that Rubio “directly misled law enforcement.” As Stephen Miller — Trump’s Senior Policy Adviser and former communications director for Sen. Jeff Sessions — recently told Breitbart News Daily, Rubio watched on as Chuck Schumer allowed Capitol Hill security to remove Crane from the Gang of Eight press conference. Miller said that Crane was removed simply “for having the temerity to ask a question” on behalf of law enforcement after Rubio had broken his promises.
Breitbart News has previously reported how Rubio continues to support all of the substantive policies outlined in his Gang of Eight bill — including the controversial aspect of the bill which would have allowed convicted criminal aliens, such as sex offenders and gang members, to remain in the United States and become U.S. citizens.