Donald Trump decided to back up his racist rhetoric about Mexicans with an actual policy plan he released this weekend, and yes, it's every bit as bad as one would expect. The wingnuts love it though.
Chuck Todd asked him about it on this Sunday's Meet the Press and here's how he responded: Donald Trump Promises To Deport Parents Of U.S. Citizens, Also Keep Families Together:
Business mogul Donald Trump released an immigration plan this weekend almost exclusively focused on enforcement and cracking down on unauthorized immigrants, including preventing babies born in the U.S. to undocumented parents from U.S. citizenship as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.
The GOP presidential candidate also repeated a vow to end President Barack Obama's deportation relief policies for parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. He would instead deport those mothers and fathers, he said. Trump insisted it could be done without separating families -- a claim that, although he does not say so explicitly, would effectively mean forcing out children with the right to be in the U.S. if they wanted to remain with their parents.
"We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," Trump told NBC's Chuck Todd in a "Meet the Press" interview that aired Sunday. [...]
In his immigration plan, Trump reiterated that he would make the Mexican government pay for a wall between the two countries.
"[T]he Mexican government has taken the United States to the cleaners," the plan reads. "They are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up. ... We will not be taken advantage of anymore."
Trump also proposed tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and mandating an electronic verification system for employers to check whether a potential hire or employee has legal status to work. He would also make overstaying a visa a criminal offense, not a civil one. Under his proposal, cities and counties would lose federal law enforcement grants if they did not cooperate with ICE, and visas would be denied to citizens of countries that refused to accept deportees from the U.S.
Here's more from Little Green Footballs: Donald Trump Has Released an Immigration Policy Plan and It’s Completely Insane:
Donald Trump has actually released an immigration policy plan, which is more than any of the other candidates have done.
However.
It’s absolutely insane. Xenophobia completely off the scale. We’re talking batshit, cubed.
Let me summarize this bizarre fear-mongering screed.
Trump insists he’s going to build a gigantic impenetrable wall along the southern border, and he’s going to make Mexico pay for it. [...]
And last but pretty damned far from least, Trump says he’s basically going to either repeal or ignore the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, because he’s planning to end birthright citizenship. His plan doesn’t spell out exactly how he’d accomplish this, probably because he knows it’s never going to happen in the real world.
In fact, none of this is ever going to happen in the real world, and if Trump becomes president and actually tries to make it happen, it would involve turning the United States into a full-blown police state.
But I guess that prospect is attractive to conservatives.
And one final note about Trump’s plan: to back up his claims, he links to not one, not two, but six articles at the far right xenophobia-peddling website Breitbart “News.”
This has to be one of the most disturbing policy statements ever published by a Republican, and that, my friends, is really saying something.
And as Digby noted, Ann Coulter just loves it.