On Thursday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director under President Obama, stated that the Trump administration is pursuing self-deportation and has caused some illegal immigrants to decide to leave the country voluntarily while they can.
Sandweg said, “Look, I think we’re going to find here is that the outcomes, maybe this year are not so dramatically different, certainly, let’s say, you compare it to the Obama years. I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to the Biden years, because, until the last six months of the Biden administration, we had a completely different border, we had hundreds of thousands of people come across and making asylum claims, that bogs down ICE and their internal operations.”
He added that the major difference between Trump and Obama is Trump is “trying to do, really, not just a mass deportation, but a self-deportation. I think you’ve seen that in the rhetoric. They’ve really shifted to overtly discussing that, and they’re not — what they’re trying to do is by taking part of the guardrails off, is create a climate of fear where more people are going to self-deport.”
Sandweg concluded, “What we don’t know yet is what impact this has had on the population that lived here. They’re now looking at this saying, hey, I’m scared now living in the U.S. I might end up in an El Salvadoran prison. I might be detained or deported. I’m just going to leave voluntarily while I can.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
