Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) suggested during an interview over the weekend that Republicans needed to have “realistic” expectations about how many deportations will happen during the next four years under President-elect Donald Trump.
Thune made the remarks during a Sunday interview on NBC News’ “Meet The Press” when asked about Trump’s top agenda item after taking office — the removal of millions of illegal aliens who have invaded the country under President Joe Biden.
“Certainly there are categories of people who’ve committed crimes,” he said when talking about who should be targeted first for deportation. “There are over a million people that the current administration had targeted for deportation. And 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’ve come in just in the last four years under this administration’s policies, many of whom are not here for good reasons.”
“I mean, we know we’ve apprehended almost 300 people at the southern border that are on the terrorist watch list. And you’ve got criminals, and cartel members, and gang members, and all of the above,” he continued. “So I think that as we think about what those next steps are, the first thing is securing that border, and making sure that we change the incentive structure so people aren’t incentivized to come here illegally, which they have been for the past four years, and that we do everything to ensure that the border personnel, the ICE agents and border agents, have the resources that they need to do their job.”
He said that in addition to the resources needed to remove the illegal aliens, more physical barriers were needed to secure the southern border in addition to advanced technology that can assist Border Patrol agents.
“It’s going to take resources, obviously, to get people to leave the country,” he said. “We’re going to 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’s a lot of people in this country who are here illegally.”
“But I think they have identified already and, like I said, anybody who has committed a crime in this country clearly out to be on that list,” he said. “And there are a bunch of folks, over 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’ll go from there and figure it out. But I think that the administration when they take office, these are decisions, obviously, they’re going to have to make.”
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