2024 CNN Town Hall: on Immigration


Donald Trump: FactCheck: border wall 52 new miles, plus rebuilt 406 miles

[CNN Town Hall transcript]: Q: COLLINS: Some of your Republican rivals have criticized your for not finishing the border wall.

TRUMP: I did finish the wall. I built the wall.

Q: You didn't finish the wall. It was only about 52 miles of new wall.

TRUMP: I built hundreds of miles of wall and I finished it, and then I said, "we have to build some more because there are areas like water going through a dam." You close up one and they come in through another. And we started another 100 miles of wall.

USNWR Fact Check: Before Biden stopped new construction on the wall, the Trump administration had built 458 miles of what it dubbed "border wall system" [out of 1,954 miles of the US-Mexico border]. The vast majority of the 458 miles were constructed in places where some kind of barrier already existed, but most of the preexisting structures were far less imposing than the new wall and included fencing and rudimentary technical barriers.

Source: US News & World Report on CNN Town Hall (2024 candidates) Feb 7, 2022

Chris Christie: Send the National Guard to secure the southern border

Send the National Guard to the southern border. No matter how hard our Customs and Border Patrol agents and our Immigration and Customs enforcements agents are working, they need back-up. They're dealing with people who are armed, dangerous, many of them bringing drugs into the country. Some of them aren't. But we need to secure that border.
Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates Jun 12, 2023

Donald Trump: Would reinstitute family separation policy at the border

Q: Another immigration policy you had was the zero-tolerance immigration policy that separated families at the border. If you're re-elected, are you ruling out instituting that?

TRUMP: Well, when you have that policy, people don't come. If a family hears they're going to be separated, they love their family, they don't come.

Q: But, would you re-implement that if you were re-elected? Is that what you are saying?

TRUMP: Well, we have to save our country, alright?

Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates May 10, 2023

Mike Pence: Allow people to work here for a short period of time

I truly do believe that we can fix a broken immigration system. We can build an immigration system that's built on the principles of merit and the needs of the American people. But we also can create a system where people that want to come and work whether it be in agriculture, where in other trades can come and for a short period of time pay taxes, participate in our economy and go home.
Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates Jun 7, 2023

Nikki Haley: We will defund sanctuary cities once and for all

We did a mandatory E-Verify program that made businesses prove that the people they hired were here legally. We will do a national E- Verify program. We will defund sanctuary cities once and for all. We will stop giving the hundreds of billions of dollars of handouts to illegal immigrants. We will go back to remain in Mexico because guess what, nobody wants to remain in Mexico. We will keep the provisions of Title 42. And instead of catch and release, we will go to catch and deport.
Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates Jun 4, 2023

Nikki Haley: Admit immigrants on merit, not on random quotas

Presidents in the past have always said, set quotas. I'll take this many this year, this many next year. Instead, look at what does our economy need? Our farmers needed workers. We need to make sure we are focusing on the businesses not struggling to find workers. When you do it on merit, and that's how we need to bring people in. Based on merit, not just a random quota, then you're building up your economy. You're supporting your businesses. You're making sure that we can all grow together.
Source: CNN Town Hall 2024 pre-Iowa caucus Jan 4, 2024

Ron DeSantis: Children born here to illegal immigrants aren't "anchors"

DeSantis said, "The 14th Amendment obviously applies to U.S. citizens. It was never the intended to say, you come illegally across the border, have a kid, and all of sudden, the kid is an American citizen? That creates an anchor in the society so that you then can't deport the illegal aliens who came in. It's an incentive to come illegally. When people are coming illegally, they do not have a birthright at that point."

[DeSantis is proposing to overturn a Supreme Court precedent from 1898]: Fact Check by The Guardian, Mar. 16 2020 Children born on US soil can't just immediately safeguard their family members from deportation. A US citizen must be 21 years old before they can sponsor their parents for a green card. Even if parents do get a green card, they have a five-year holding period before they can finally apply for naturalization. In the end, the so-called "anchor baby" pathway to citizenship is at least a 26-year endeavor, even for those who entered the US legally.

Source: Guardian FactCheck on CNN Town Hall 2024 pre-Iowa caucus Jan 4, 2024

Ron DeSantis: Remain in Mexico; no benefit from military-age males

Q: You're vowing to deport all undocumented immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration. So by the end of your first term, every single one of those undocumented immigrants will be out of the country?

DeSANTIS: It's not limited to just what's coming from Biden, but we're going to start there and go through that. So, obviously, all of them that we can do there. You have millions more people coming in. That puts the screws on the housing. So, you have to enforce the law. We're going to definitely start with those Biden folks because I think it was reckless that he led all these people in illegally. It's not just people coming from Mexico or Central America. Yes, there's a lot from a hundred different countries--China, Middle Eastern countries, Russia. And you know what a lot of it is? Military age males. Do you think that's going to be a benefit for this country to have those folks coming in that we know nothing about? I think it's a security risk and we need to act.

Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates Jan 16, 2024

Ron DeSantis: Shipping migrants to Martha's Vineyard made it a news issue

Q: How do tactics such as rounding up illegal immigrants and shipping them to Martha's Vineyard bring the nation together to discuss comprehensive immigration reform? Wasn't that a little more than a cheap political stunt?

DeSANTIS: If you go back to September 2022, how was the border being treated? It was not at front-burner issue. The problems were real, but it wasn't getting the type of scrutiny that it needed. Martha's Vineyard said they were sanctuary jurisdiction. They said "all people are welcome, whether they're legal or not." These border towns in Texas are getting thousands and thousands. Martha's Vineyard couldn't even handle 50. But this was something that the media really glommed onto. So it ended up raising the temperature on this, and now you have this being discussed everywhere. So I don't think it was cheap at all. We banned sanctuary cities in Florida. As president, I'm not going to allow sanctuary states or sanctuary cities in this country. They're violating the law.

Source: CNN Town Hall: interviews of 2024 presidential candidates Jan 16, 2024

  • The above quotations are from 2024 CNN Town Halls.
  • Click here for definitions & background information on Immigration.
  • Click here for other issues (main summary page).
  • Click here for more quotes by Chris Christie on Immigration.
  • Click here for more quotes by Vivek Ramaswamy on Immigration.
2024 Presidential contenders on Immigration:
  Candidates for President & Vice-President:
V.P.Kamala Harris (D-CA)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.(I-CA)
Chase Oliver(L-GA)
Dr.Jill Stein(D-MA)
Former Pres.Donald Trump(R-FL)
Sen.J.D.Vance(R-OH)
Gov.Tim Walz(D-MN)
Dr.Cornel West(I-NJ)

2024 presidential primary contenders:
Pres.Joe_Biden(D-DE)
N.D.Gov.Doug Burgum(R)
N.J.Gov.Chris_Christie(R)
Fla.Gov.Ron_DeSantis(R)
S.C.Gov.Nikki_Haley(R)
Ark.Gov.Asa_Hutchinson(R)
Former V.P.Mike Pence(R-IN)
U.S.Rep.Dean_Phillips(D-MN)
Vivek_Ramaswamy(R-OH)
S.C.Sen.Tim_Scott(R)
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Page last updated: Oct 27, 2024