(NewsNation) — Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly criticized former President Trump for his pledge to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history.
“It’s impossible,” O’Reilly said Wednesday on NewsNation’s “CUOMO.” “As soon as Donald Trump orders federal marshals, or whomever, to remove people from their property, the ACLU and everybody else would file lawsuits, and the federal courts would stop it. It would take 10 minutes to stop it.”
O’Reilly, instead, suggests Trump “write an executive order that says ‘if you are in this country without documentation, you must register with the federal government.'”
“Mass Deportation Now!” declared the signs at the Republican National Convention, giving a full embrace to Trump’s pledge.
The former prsident is putting immigration at the heart of his campaign to retake the White House and pushing the Republican Party towards a bellicose strategy that hearkens back to the 1950s, when former President Eisenhower launched a deportation policy known by a racial slur — “Operation Wetback.”
Trump, when pressed for specifics on his plan in an interview with Time magazine this year, suggested he would use the National Guard, and possibly even the military, to target 15-20 million people — though the government estimated in 2022 there were 11 million migrants living in the U.S. without permanent legal permission.
His plans have raised the stakes of this year’s election beyond fortifying the southern border, a longtime conservative priority, to the question of whether America should make a fundamental change in its approach to immigration.
After the southern border saw a historic number of crossings during the Biden administration, Democrats have also moved rightward on the issue, often leading with promises of border security before talking about relief for the immigrants who are already in the country.
Trump won 35 percent of Hispanic voters in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, and support for stronger border enforcement measures has grown among Hispanic voters. But an AP analysis of two consecutive polls conducted in June by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that about half of Hispanic Americans have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Trump.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.