President-elect Donald Trump managed a narrow electoral victory in a sharply divided country — and it's unclear exactly what voters brought him in to do. Many voters have cited inflation as their driving factor. But not all of them have.
In conversation with a New York Times focus group released on Tuesday, many voters who backed Trump specifically said he has a mandate to remove immigrants from the country.
Trump, said Kentucky house cleaner Direnda, 66, has been elected to "get rid of all these immigrants that have come into major cities and have caused problems."
She added, "My father is from Iceland. He came here. He was in the military. He spent four years in the American military. He became a citizen, and he worked for it. He didn’t sneak in to do it. I have seen a lot of theft and crime, and it revolves around people that are not documented."
Asked if she wants to see mass deportation, she replied, "I really do, because it does throw the United States in a whirlwind."
Nicholas, a 20-year-old driver from New York, agreed, saying Trump was elected "to defend the people of our country. Illegal immigration, now, that is something that does affect me personally. I live in South Brooklyn, where we have the infamous Floyd Bennett Field migrant shelter. And during a snowstorm or a storm last year, the migrants were brought to my former alma mater to sleep there for the night, and people could not go to school the next day because we had to house them."
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Kathi, a 57-year-old property manager from Ohio, took it a step further, saying she also had a problem with legal immigration: "They come here. They get so many benefits. I think we need to move a little bit away from keep talking about the illegals and talking about immigration in general."
Eight out of the 13 participants backed Trump's plans for mass deportations, including Noah, the sole Latino on the panel.
Currently, the logistics of how such a plan would work are up in the air, as removing millions of people would be a monumentally challenging task in terms of adjudication, processing, and transportation. Experts have suggested Trump is likely to enlist local sheriffs and volunteers in the process, and his advisers have considered illegally dumping people in countries they've never even visited if their home country won't agree to repatriate them.
