Donald Trump, former US President and the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 presidential elections, said on Saturday that many people will leave the country if he is re-elected. “As soon as we win, you know what’s gonna happen. People are gonna flood out of the country. They’re gonna flood out before we even do anything,” Trump said.
“They’re gonna leave the country because they’re gonna understand that I will immediately restore and expand the Trump travel ban on entry from terror-plagued countries,” the former president said, as per a video from the rally, posted by the Right Side Broadcasting, an American conservative media company.
Trump added, “And I will implement strong ideological screening for all illegal immigrants. If you hate America. If you want to abolish Israel, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country. We don’t want you.”
Trump said while promising to crack down on illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration if elected to a second four-year term in office. If re-elected, Trump promised “to stop the invasion of our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Donald Trump’s travel ban was first introduced in an executive order by the former president in January 2017. It targeted seven Muslim-majority countries. It barred the entry into the US of people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Sudan.
The ban expanded in January 2020 to include Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Sudan. But Joe Biden signed an executive order rescinding the travel ban in 2021, the Hindustan Times reported.
Immigrants ‘poisoning blood of our country…’
Trump said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”.
During a campaign event in New Hampshire on Saturday, Trump was quoted by Reuters as saying, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country…they have poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world,” Trump said at a rally in the city of Durham.
He reportedly said immigrants were coming to the US from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. “All over the world they are pouring into our country.”
Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination and has made border security a major theme of his campaign. He vowed to restore the hardline policies from his 2017-2021 presidency, and implement new ones that clamp down further on immigration.