Donald Trump plans sweeping undocumented immigrant roundups, detention camps

If re-elected in 2024, former US President Donald Trump would expand his first-term immigration enforcement to include massive roundups of people who would be kept in vast camps to await deportation, according to the New York Times on Saturday.

According to the Times, the article was based on interviews with many aides, including Stephen Miller, who managed Trump’s first-term immigration plans.

It described Trump’s plans as “an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history” and said it aimed to deport millions of people every year, including those who have been settled in the United States for decades.

Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and he will almost certainly face US President Joe Biden in a replay of their 2020 campaign.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not respond.

In a campaign address in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump did not discuss the idea of establishing huge detention camps.

The Biden-Harris campaign in a statement called Trump’s immigration plans “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that are “meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared nation is how he wins this election.”

Trump will reinstate his ban on people from certain Muslim-majority nations, among other things, according to the publication.

He would reinstate other extreme practises, such as the COVID-19-era denial of asylum petitions, but this time the refusals would be based on suspicions that migrants carry other dangerous diseases, according to the report.

According to the publication, Trump wants to expedite deportations by expanding a type of removal that does not require due process hearings.

According to the report, Trump will transfer federal agents and deputise local police and National Guard troops volunteered by Republican-led states to assist US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in widespread roundups of undocumented immigrants.

He would ease the strain on ICE detention facilities by building huge camps to hold detainees while their cases are processed as they await deportation.

To underwrite the massive operation if Congress refused, Trump would redirect Pentagon funds as he did with his border wall in his first term, the Times said.

“We’ll stop the invasion on our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said on Saturday.

In September, Trump told a rally in Iowa the deportation operation would be along the lines of the “Eisenhower model,” the Times said. That was a 1954 campaign named after an ethnic slur – Operation Wetback – to detain and expel Mexican immigrants.

Other parts of Trump’s plan call for screening visa applicants for ideological views, revoking the temporary protected status of people from certain countries deemed unsafe, and trying to end the citizenship birthright for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents, the newspaper said.