Gallego waffles on mass deportations, won’t ‘knee-jerk reject’ Trump plans

Once upon a time, Ruben Gallego wasn’t scared to clown Donald Trump for his terrible immigration policies.

During Trump’s first term in the White House, Gallego used his platform in the House of Representatives to forcefully call out the MAGA president over border security. In a 2017 op-ed in The Arizona Republic — titled “Why we should not ever build Trump’s border wall (ever)” — Gallego called the wall a monument to Trump that was “trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” That same year, Gallego released a statement opposing the Trump administration’s new guidelines for who can be deported, which Gallego said “lay the groundwork for mass deportation.”

Gallego wrote, “I am dedicated to holding the Trump administration accountable, and will continue to call out these policies for what they are: un-American.”

Mass deportation is explicitly what Trump has promised for his second term, but good news! Once Gallego is sworn in Friday as a U.S. Senator, he’ll be in an even more powerful position to push back forcefully against the Republican president’s harmful immigration policies. Now, having won a statewide election while muzzling his inner firebrand and tacking to the middle on border security, he’ll finally be able to let the anti-MAGA dogs loose.

Right?

Nope, at least not yet. On Thursday, Gallego met with members of the Arizona press to discuss his goals as a senator. Howie Fischer of Capitol News Service asked Gallego what he intends to do about the president-elect’s plans for what Trump has called “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Instead of responding with the old progressive vim and vigor, though, Gallego met the question with a middle-of-the-road nonanswer.

Gallego talked about what he heard Arizonans on the campaign trail say they wanted: more border security, more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, border walls where necessary and “a certain type of illegal immigrants deported.” What he didn’t hear Arizonans support is “family separations, and I didn’t hear about no jailing of kids.”

Trump did exactly those things his last time in office, but Gallego professed ignorance of the incoming administration’s specific deportation plans and said he wouldn’t “knee-jerk reject anything that comes from the White House.” Instead, Gallego said he hopes to work with the White House to solve border security issues for which his constituents vocalized their support.

“We’re going to wait and hear what their actual goals are,” Gallego said. “See if we can work together to really fulfill what Arizonans asked of me to do.”

One problem, though: The idea that the Trump administration’s goals are ill-defined strains credulity. Trump’s “border czar” is Tom Homan, the same guy who led ICE when the agency separated migrant children from their parents, a policy that Gallego and others heavily criticized. For Trump’s second term, the president-elect has handed Homan the keys to the deportation machine, which Homan will use to similar ends.

Homan hasn’t been evasive about his aims. When NBC News asked the former border patrol agent how he would go about its mass deportations — and specifically how the administration would keep families together — Homan provided a less than reassuring answer.

He doesn’t “want to be breaking up families,” he said. Instead, “the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.” That would include, of course, U.S.-born children who are American citizens.

In other media appearances, Homan has suggested using the U.S. military, the private sector and local authorities to aid the federal government in conducting mass deportations. He also said the federal government will set up a phone line that people can use to snitch on potential undocumented immigrants in their communities.

With Gallego’s newly announced appointment to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, the freshman senator is in a unique position to stifle such a reign of anti-immigrant terror. Instead, Gallego said Thursday that he wants to secure more funding for ICE that will allow the agency to work with “law enforcement to deal with criminal aliens that do exist in this country, especially those who we believe should be deported.” He’d also try “to figure out if there is a pathway to immigration reform.”

And endorsement of mass deportations? Hardly. But neither was it a full-throated repudiation of it. Gallego failed to mention DACA recipients, the children of undocumented immigrants who have been protected from deportation because they were brought to the country at very young ages. Gallego has been a strong supporter of DACA protections in the past. Though many Trump allies would love to eliminate those protections, the threat to DACA didn’t merit a mention from Gallego on Thursday.

When asked directly about mass deportations, Gallego equivocated rather than denounced. Arizonans and pro-immigrant advocates who are girding themselves for a fight better hope the old Gallego is still in there somewhere.

Or, they may want to find themselves another champion.