Former President Trump on Wednesday vowed to reimpose and expand a travel ban that targeted several majority-Muslim countries and said he would shift parts of federal law enforcement to focus on immigration if he is elected to a second White House term.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared in Dubuque, Iowa, for a speech to supporters and focused at length on his plans for curbing immigration if he is elected in 2024.
Trump, who in 2016 campaigned on a hard-line immigration agenda and reshaped GOP orthodoxy on the issue, pledged to go even further if he secures another term.
The former president vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American History,” according to prepared remarks shared with The Hill.
He said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts that allowed the deportation of any immigrant who hailed from a country at war with the United States.
Trump said he would use the law to remove “all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers or cartel members from the United States.”
Trump also said he would shift portions of federal law enforcement, including those at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to focus on immigration enforcement, according to prepared remarks.
The former president also said he would deploy troops to the southern border if needed, and deploy the Navy to impose a blockade in the region to combat the spread of fentanyl.
Trump also vowed to bring back one of his most controversial policies from his first term, a travel ban that limited visas from several predominantly Muslim countries.
The travel ban was revised numerous times in the face of legal challenges to eventually include five countries with majority-Muslim populations — Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia — as well as North Korea and Venezuela before the Supreme Court upheld it in 2018.
Trump said he would bring back the travel ban and “expand it even further to keep Radical Islamic Terrorists out of our country,” according to prepared remarks. He also said he would use existing law to “deny entry” into the U.S. for “communists and Marxists.”
The former president’s remarks reflect the Republican Party’s rightward shift on immigration, abandoning pushes from some lawmakers for compromise on issues of border security and citizenship for young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
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Instead, Trump and others running for the GOP nomination have relentlessly attacked the flow of migrants at the southern border, at times referring to it as an “invasion” and criticizing the Biden administration over its policies.
The Washington Post reported that a record number of migrant families crossed the U.S. border in August, even as the Biden administration has tried to discourage parents from entering the country illegally with their children.
The spike in August came after numbers had dropped over the summer following the end of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed U.S. officials to rapidly expel migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.