Today, State Representative and Trump Florida Campaign Finance Chairman Carlos Trujillo tried to obscure the GOP’s immigration plans, arguing that Donald Trump is “still forming a solution” as to how he would handle the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the United States, once the border was deemed secure.
If elected, Trump will attempt to remove 11 million people from the United States in 18 months with his Deportation Force. Additionally, he plans to deport 4.5 millionU.S. citizen children, who were born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. If successful, on average, at least one American citizen child in every American classroom would be deported.
This is not the first time that Trujillo has joined his party’s faithful in defending Trump’s racist rhetoric and xenophobia, and his comments come on the heels of the Republican National Convention, during which the GOP adopted Trump’s border wall as their official platform. Clearly, Trump’s brand of anti-immigrant rhetoric has become the guiding ethos of the Republican Party.
Despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric adopted by many Republican politicians, a massive-sample Gallup poll from last week found that 84% of Americans, including 76% of Republicans, favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It seems as if Florida Republicans like Trujillo are scrambling to convince Latinos that the Republican party has not completely turned against them–but voters aren’t so easily fooled.
“We’ve called him Trumpillo because he’s slowly morphing into the local version of Trump. But the community won’t be fooled,” said Maria Rodriguez of FLIC Votes. “Floridians do want immigration reform – comprehensive reform that keeps families together and builds on the bonds that they have created locally,”
“Recent protests and polls tell the story that Trump’s GOP colleagues don’t want to hear – that a significant majority of Latinos and Floridians won’t stand for such divisive fearful talk,” said Florida’s Voice State Director Elbert Garcia. “What the public wants are solutions that strengthen communities, not those that tear them apart.”
