In a rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday in support of Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, Donald Trump warned voters about the dangers of a second Biden term and criticized the current administration’s approach to border security. “On day one, my administration will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration and we begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, larger than that by far of Dwight Eisenhower,” Trump said. “You know, Eisenhower had a similar problem, but peanuts by comparison. It’s like the border. I did a great job on the border. The border was terrible, but it was peanuts by comparison to what it is now; it’s like a little tiny, a small percentage. Now, I mean, nobody’s ever had to go through this. Nobody ever.”
Following the speech, Biden’s Wins, the self-described “largest online community of President Biden’s supporters,” claimed that Trump said he would “round Latinos up and put them in detention facilities.” Other Democratic-supporting accounts made similar statements claiming that Trump would round up millions of Latinos and build mass detention camps.
Trump, however, never specifically mentioned Latinos or called for mass detention camps during his speech, though he did say that his administration would pursue a large-scale deportation program for undocumented migrants.
While the majority of undocumented migrants encountered at the southern border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) come from predominantly Latino countries of origin, a significant number also come from non-Latino nations. In fiscal year 2022, for example, Customs and Border Protection recorded approximately 808,000 encounters with migrants from Mexico, but it also encountered approximately 25,000 from Ukraine, 21,000 from Russia, 18,000 from India, 15,000 from Turkey, 6,000 from Romania, and 2,000 from China.
Regarding Trump’s reference to President Eisenhower, the U.S. implemented a new immigration enforcement regime beginning in 1954, led by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), to curb the high levels of undocumented immigration from Mexico that occurred during the prior decade. The operation rounded up undocumented immigrants in the American Southwest. The INS claimed that about 1.1 million people were either deported or left the country voluntarily during the program, but most independent estimates place the count closer to 300,000.
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