Trump plotting massive migrant sweeps, mega detention camps if elected: report

Former President Donald Trump is plotting an intense crackdown on immigration if he is elected to a second term next year — including rounding up undocumented immigrants and holding them in large detention camps as they wait to be expelled from the country, according to a report.

The leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is aiming to deport millions of people each year, several advisors told The New York Times.

The plan would not only target the nearly 4 million migrants that have crossed the US border since President Biden took office in 2021, but would include those that have been settled in the country for decades.

Trump’s intense immigration bust would resurrect a series of regulations he had introduced during his presidency — such as a ban on the entry of people from certain Muslim-majority countries — and introduce new policies that would speed up the deportation process, the newspaper reported.

The ex-Commander-in-Chief, 77, would deputize local police and National Guard troops volunteered by Republican-run states to aid US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in rounding up undocumented people, the sources said.

Former President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a campaign event on Nov. 11, 2023, in Claremont, New Hampshire. Getty Images

The migrants would then be ushered into newly built, massive detention camps, which would be erected to ease the swelling on the ICE facilities Trump intends to fill to capacity.

If Congress refused to approve the massive operation, Trump would redirect Pentagon funds as he did with his border wall in his first term.

The Biden-Harris campaign issued a statement slamming the supposed immigration plans, calling them “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that are “meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared nation is how he wins this election.”

Migrants from Colombia camp at the US side of the border wall after crossing the border from Mexico in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, on Nov. 10, 2023.REUTERS
Migrants and migrant children heading back to the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, NY on Sep. 6, 2023. Christopher Sadowski

The surge in migrants entering the US over the past several years has been a major campaign point across both party lines.

Trump has repeatedly promised to quell the crisis at the southern border, pledging last month to reinstate the ban on migrants entering the US “from terror-plagued countries” if he is re-elected.

“If you’re coming from somewhere full of people who want to kill Americans, we will not let you in,” Trump said during a speech in Clive, Iowa.

“We aren’t bringing in anyone from Gaza or Syria or Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, or anywhere else that threatens our security,” he vowed.

Trump previously called for “strong ideological screening of all immigrants” and aggressive deportations of illegal immigrations with “jihadist sympathies.”

With Post Wires