Former president Donald Trump promised his mass deportation plan would begin in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado—two cities at the center of anti-immigration talk this week.
Speaking at a press conference in Los Angeles, the Republican nominee in the 2024 election repeated claims of a Venezuelan gang takeover of Aurora, as well as unfounded accusations that Haitian migrants in Springfield have been eating residents’ pets.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said Friday afternoon. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”
Trump has promised mass deportations as part of his election campaign for months, promising to bring in the army and local law enforcement to remove millions of illegal immigrants.
At Friday’s press conference, Trump promised to send them “back to Venezuela”, after saying he would begin in Springfield where much of the migrant population is from Haiti.
“The people of Ohio are scared,” Trump said Friday. “The people of Colorado… you have a Governor there who is very weak, he doesn’t know what to do.”
Trump and his running mate JD Vance have pushed the idea that Haitians in the Ohio city have been eating and stealing pets and livestock, squatting and spreading communicable diseases.
Local officials and community leaders have sought to dispel these claims, but tensions have run high and bomb threats were made on Thursday and Friday, leading to the closures of schools and municipal buildings.
Many of those who have moved to Springfield are there legally under Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants.
In Aurora, Colorado, apartment complexes did see problems with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, with members of the notorious group moving in and causing issues for Venezuelan residents and others.
The city’s mayor, Mike Coffman, told Newsweek last Friday that the story had gotten out of hand and that the gang was not in charge of apartment buildings. Police later identified members of the group known to them.
The GOP’s mass deportation promise has been called into question by immigration advocacy groups and Democrats, but a Republican representative also raised concerns.
Representative Tony Gonzales, who represents Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, told Newsweek that the country did not have the resources to carry out such a plan.
“You’re not going to round up 10 million people and deport them. It’s simple—you do not have the infrastructure to do that,” Gonzales said. “I think we should start by deporting the over 10,000 bad actors that we have, and I think that in itself is going to be a handful.”
Deportations have increased under President Biden, whom Trump has heavily criticized, alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, on border security.Many of the illegal or undocumented migrants in the U.S. have been in the country for many years and are waiting for their immigration cases to be heard.
