Axios reports on a new PRRI survey:
President-elect Trump has suggested that he’ll use the military in immigration raids and turn to a 1798 law to put immigrants in camps. His base appears to support those plans despite the likely fierce opposition from most Americans. 46% of Republicans endorse using the military in mass deportation raids and placing immigrants in camps, according to a nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) post-election survey.That’s more than double that of independent voters (19%) who agree with the idea.And that’s more than five times as Democratic voters (8%) who supported this policy.
“There have been questions in the Trump era where I’ve thought…I can’t believe that we need to know the answer to this question,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios.”I guess the good news is that three-quarters of the country rejects this idea that we should be putting immigrants in the country illegally into internment camps guarded by the military.”Jones said the bad news is that nearly half of people who consider themselves members of a mainstream political party do.
Trump said in his recent TIME “Person of the Year” interview that he would be open to using camps to hold detained immigrants in the U.S.
His “Border Czar” Tom Homan has been filling in the blanks on the mass deportation proposals:
Homan told the Washington Post in an article published Thursday that the administration plans to locate more than 300,000 children he described as “missing” in the U.S.
Both Trump and Homan have previously expressed support for deporting families of mixed immigration status, and Homan expounded on the idea in the interview with the Post. “Here’s the issue,” Homan told the Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position. He noted that it will be up to families to decide if they would prefer to be deported together or split up.
Homan also said the U.S. would resume family detentions and “construct family facilities” to do so.
Since 2019, about 450,000 unaccompanied minors have been transferred to ORR, according to a Department of Homeland Security oversight report published in August. During that time, 32,000 did not show up for scheduled court hearings, and an additional 291,000 were not issued a notice to appear by ICE.
Homan acknowledged that many of those young people are probably with their parents or other family members, but he said he wants to mobilize nonprofit groups and private contractors to carry out a more concerted effort to track them down.
What could go wrong?