During a recent visit to his so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” an ICE migrant detention center opening in the Florida Everglades, President Donald Trump again suggested the idea that the United States should deport some U.S. citizens who have committed certain crimes.
While answering questions from the press at the detention center on Tuesday, Trump suggested that there are immigrants who are now citizens, as well as those born in the United States, who should be deported. He also managed to take a swipe at former President Joe Biden in the process.
“I’d like to say, it’s a little controversial but I couldn’t care less: We have a lot of bad criminals who came into this country, and they came in stupidly,” said Trump. He continued, “It was an unforced error. It was an incompetent president who allowed it to happen. It was an auto-pen, maybe.”
He added, “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time…they’re not new to our country, they’re old to our country. Many of them were born in our country and I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too.”
Trump’s call for deportation of possible citizens comes after the Department of Justice released a memo on June 11 looking to prioritize the revocation of citizenship from some naturalized Americans—also known as denaturalization—who commit certain crimes.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate granted U.S. attorneys “wide discretion to decide when to pursue the denaturalization process in order to ‘advance the Administration’s policy objectives’ and specifically torture, war crimes, human trafficking and human rights violations.”
Legal experts have long called the suggestion to deport citizens unconstitutional, something that even Trump acknowledges as a hurdle, while stressing that if he could do it legally, he would.
“I’m just saying if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said. “I don’t know if we do or not. We’re looking at that right now.”
