2 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Mass Deportation . . . Except at Hotels?
How far does President Trump envision his mass deportation project going? As if to heighten the ambiguity, on Thursday morning he tapped out this sentence on Truth Social: 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.'
Then Mr. Trump turned the focus back where the White House wants it, which is gang members and threats to public safety. 'We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA,' he said. 'Changes are coming!' How cryptic. The electorate is with Mr. Trump on catching and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. Yet much more than that is happening, and more than farmers and hoteliers are concerned.
Vincent Scardina is a Trump voter in Key West, Fla., who owns a roofing company. Six of his workers, originally from Nicaragua, were en route to a job late last month when they were detained, according to a report by a local NBC affiliate. Their attorney says five of those men have valid work permits, pending asylum cases, and no criminal records. We haven't been able to verify that, but if it's correct, jailing them is a strange enforcement priority.
'It's going to be really hard to replace those guys,' Mr. Scardina said. 'We're not able, in Key West, to just replace people as easily as, say, a big city.' He also got emotional. 'You get to know these guys. You become their friends,' he said. 'You see what happens to their family.' Mr. Scardina's message to the President that he helped to elect: 'What happened here? This situation is just totally, just blatantly, not at all what they said it was.'
