Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to claim he would carry out mass deportations if elected President, contending his “big program” would hearken back to a President seven decades ago.
“If you let people come illegally without a sanction, you’re going to continue to have this problem. The sanction is you get deported. So we’re going to do it,” DeSantis said on The Blaze.
The Governor pledged a policy of last in, first out, saying his administration would “start with the more recent arrivals and work our way back,” though offering no indication how far back he would go.
“But it’s going to be a big program similar to what (Dwight) Eisenhower did in the 1950s,” DeSantis said, presumably referring to Operation Wetback, a first-term program that saw anywhere from 300,000 to 1.3 million people deported, removed from the United States on planes and boats and repatriated to Mexico.
“I’m really the only candidate that you can trust to do it,” DeSantis added. “I mean, I know Donald Trump is promising it, but he said the same thing in 2016 and didn’t deliver on it. A lot of the other Republicans, as you rightfully point out, they’re uncomfortable even talking about doing that. But we’re never going to solve the problem unless we have the rule of law prevail.”
DeSantis continues to float mass deportations, but it seems his rhetoric and his promises are still being fine-tuned.
During an interview last week with an Iowa radio station, the 2024 presidential candidate ameliorated his previous promise to remove “everyone who has come in illegally under Biden” to “the last ones to come in under Biden are going to be the first ones out.
“Well, here’s the thing. So I don’t know how many are here,” DeSantis admitted.
“We’ve been told for many years, it was like 10, 11 million. But just under Biden, there’s been 6 or 7 million. You can’t say (that) because you’re not going to be able to do 100%, that then you should send none. I mean, I think that that’s a non-starter. You have to establish that there’s going to be a sanction. You have to enforce the law. Clearly, we have limited resources. You’re going to have to make choices as about how you do that.”
Though DeSantis is rooting his deportation proposal in Eisenhower policies, it should be noted that by the end of his second term, the former President was arguing for the “liberalization” of immigration standards. Eisenhower sought to not only double the quota of legal immigrants received, but also a “special provision for the absorption of many thousands of persons who are refugees without a country as a result of political upheavals and their flight from persecution.”
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