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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Moira Donegan

Trump’s proposal for mass deportation of immigrants is a moral abomination

people sit in the back of a van as a border patrol officer in uniform talks to them
People camping in the border area of Jacumba, California, are detained by US border patrol officers as they attempt to cross the border from Mexico on 4 June 2024. Photograph: Katie McTiernan/Anadolu via Getty Images)

If you didn’t know any better, you might think, from recent media coverage, that the problem with Donald Trump’s proposal to round up and expel as many as 20 million immigrants is that it’s not likely to work.

The Republican presidential nominee has made the mass deportation pledge central to his case for a second term. On the campaign trail, he diverts every question, no matter what the issue, back to the supposed danger and malignancy of immigrants and the urgency of getting rid of them. The economy? It will be better when there are fewer immigrants competing for jobs, he says. Housing prices? They’ll come down when millions of people are kicked out of the country, he claims. Crime will come down when the immigrants are gone, he says, because murder is “in their genes”.

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