As he turns his attention to the general election, Donald Trump is signaling that he is ready to tone down his fiery rhetoric on illegal immigration – at least behind closed doors.
At the same time, Republican officials appear eager to push him in a more moderate direction, telling Hispanics that he has abandoned his divisive primary pledge to deport the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally – even if Trump hasn’t said so publicly himself.
“Trump has already said that he will not do massive deportations,” Helen Aguirre Ferre, the Republican National Committee’s director of Hispanic communications, told reporters at a Spanish-language briefing at the party’s convention two weeks ago. Instead, she said, “he will focus on removing the violent undocumented who have criminal records and live in the country.”
It’s a statement that may come as a surprise to Trump’s legion of loyal followers, many of whom were first drawn to Trump because of his hard-line views on immigration and border security. Trump has vowed to build a wall along the length of the southern border and use a “deportation force” to track down and deport anyone in the country illegally.
“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” Trump said in a TV interview last fall. He estimated in a separate interview that the process would take between 18 months and two years.
But those who would like to see Trump move in a more inclusive direction say that Trump has indicated that he no longer advocates that plan. As evidence, they point to several vague sentences from an interview Trump gave earlier this summer to Bloomberg News during a whirlwind trip to Scotland to visit his golf courses.
“President Obama has mass deported vast numbers of people – the most ever, and it’s never reported. I think people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody,” Trump told the outlet.