Former President Donald Trump has vowed on the campaign trail that if he is put back in the White House, he will carry out the "largest domestic deportation" of illegal aliens in the country's history – and a recent survey shows that most of the American people like the idea. In fact, according to the Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll, 51% of those polled said they would support mass deportation – specifically, 68% of Republicans, 46% of Independents, and 42% of Democrats favor the plan.
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says the survey tells him the American people, as a whole, are pretty fed up.
"It is a natural and understandable response to what has been going on in this country over the past three years," he says. "People have seen just this mass wave of illegal immigration coming across; and an administration that is doing nothing to stop it, but is in fact encouraging more of it.
"The American public is seeing the consequences of it daily in their communities all across the country – so, it's perfectly natural for people to say Look, enough is enough."
But Mehlman concedes it's going to be a very heavy lift to deport an estimated 16-million people – but because it won't happen overnight, "we need to start doing what we can do" now, he adds.
"Obviously, it takes a long time to deport that many people. But [via] the mere fact that you are enforcing the law … you are showing people that there are consequences," he tells AFN. "Number one, it discourages more people from coming – and number two, people start to get the idea that maybe it's not a good idea to be sticking around here, and you will see that people will decide on their own to leave."
The Axios survey also indicates that older Americans tend to favor Trump's deportation plan more so than do younger Americans.
