Even while denying a flip-flop on his much-touted plan to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, Donald Trump on Monday indicated that he may be softening his position on an issue that has been central to his presidential campaign, saying he wants to come up with a “firm but fair” policy.
A day after his new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway set tongues wagging by saying that his plan for a deportation force was something “to be determined”, Trump himself asserted: “No, I’m not flip-flopping. We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer.”
“It (the policy to deal with illegal immigration) has to be very firm. But we want to come up with something fair,” Trump told Fox News.
Trump’s possible recalibration is being seen as a bid to win over America’s largest minority, the Hispanics, amid grim projections with a recent poll showing 66 per cent of the community’s support for Hillary Clinton and just 20 per cent for him.
But the issue is nothing short of a double-edged sword for Trump. Even if he is able to gain the support of more Hispanics than the present abysmal numbers, he may conversely lose a chunk of his existing supporters who are wedded to his hard-line proposal to deport all illegal immigrants and build a wall along the Mexican border.
Close on the heels of Conway’s comments to CNN on Sunday, much of the American media was abuzz with speculation that Trump was possibly gearing up for his biggest policy flip-flop to date. She made the comments after Trump held a meeting on Saturday with Hispanic leaders to hear their views on the controversial issue.
Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, a close ally of Trump, also said that the Republican nominee was still working through his plans for deportations should he win the White House. “He’s wrestling with how to do that. People that are here unlawfully, came into the country against our laws, are subject to being removed. That’s just plain fact,” Sessions told CBS News, adding, “He’s thinking that through.”
Some of the Hispanic leaders who attended the meeting told Univision, the Spanish-language TV network, that Trump was toying with the idea of finding a way to legalise millions of undocumented immigrants – something unheard of Trump himself so far. The New York billionaire has all along held that all illegal immigrants must leave and try to return to US later through the legal route.