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 "The notion that we're gonna deport 11, 12 million people from
this country - first of all, I have no idea where Mr. Trump thinks
the money’s gonna come from. It would cost us hundreds of billions
of dollars to execute that,” Obama said in a White House interview
with ABC News, according to excerpts released by the network.
"Imagine the images on the screen flashed around the world as we
were dragging parents away from their children, and putting them in
what, detention centers, and then systematically sending them out,"
the president said. “Nobody thinks that is realistic. But more
importantly, that’s not who we are as Americans."
Trump, a real estate billionaire who has been leading in opinion
polls among candidates for the Republican nomination in the 2016
election, calls for deporting all illegal immigrants and has said he
would get the Mexican government to pay for building a wall along
the U.S.-Mexican border.
The immigration issue has driven a wedge between Hispanics, a voting
bloc with increasing clout, and Republicans, many of whom take a
hard line on illegal immigration, to the benefit of Obama's fellow
Democrats. Most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants are
Hispanic.
Obama said there has always been a streak of anti-immigrant
sentiment in the United States. "We don’t want, I think, a president
or any person in a position of leadership to play on those kinds of
fears," he told ABC.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday the Mexican
government would not build or pay for Trump's proposed wall, CNN
said.
The network said when Kerry was asked about the proposal in an
interview on CNN's Farid Zakaria GPS program, he replied: "I knew
you were trying to drag me right into the middle of the presidential
politics ... I think it’s a foregone conclusion that Mexico is not
going to build that wall."
(Reporting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Chris Reese and Tom
Brown)
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