Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Sunday that he would not deploy a special force to forcibly remove the estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., should he be elected president. Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, Cruz said that's never been the way the country has enforced laws "for any crime."
"I don't intend to send jackboots to knock on your door, and every door in America," Cruz said, according to RealClear Politics. "That's not how we enforce the law for any crime. We don't have any system that knocks on the doors of every person in America." Instead, Cruz said, the U.S. should rely on a stronger version of the E-Verify system and force U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to strictly follow the law.
Cruz was responding to an implicit comparison to Donald Trump's immigration policy that would end birthright citizenship, build a massive wall and deport more than 11 million people in a 18- to 24-month time period, costing between $100 and $200 billion, The Huffington Post reported.
In November on MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Mike Brzezinski asked Trump if he would have a "massive deportation force."
"You're going to have a deportation force, and you're going to do it humanely," Trump said, CNN reported. "Don't forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting in line to come into this country and they're waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we're going to build the wall. It's going to be a real deal. It's going to be a real wall."
Trump and others in conservative circles, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have called into question the birthplace of Cruz and whether or not that makes him eligible for the presidency, a question that CNN host Jake Tapper put to the Texas senator on Sunday.
"The Internet has all sorts of fevered swamp theories, but the facts are simple," Cruz responded, according to CNN. "My mom was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She was an American citizen by birth. She's been an American citizen all 81 years of her life. She's never been a citizen of any other place."
