‘You get to work’: Rand Paul offers a middle ground on Trump’s deportation spree
As the Trump administration makes good on its promise to arrest and deport hundreds of people in the country illegally, Kentucky’s junior senator is offering a solution for those who haven’t committed a crime.
When asked recently in an interview how President Donald Trump should handle immigrants who entered the country unlawfully but haven’t otherwise violated another law, Rand Paul said his preference is to institute a work program.
“I’ve always thought the trade-off was this: If you came here illegally, you get to work, you still don’t get to vote and you really don’t get on a track to vote. You came here illegally,” Paul told the Herald-Leader on Jan. 10. “Your punishment is you don’t have a citizenship track, but you get to stay and you get to work.
“This is how most of the world operates and it’s not really a harsh system.”
It’s an idea with a decades-long history that’s been mired in the messy politics of immigration.
There have been proposals to establish temporary legal status, guest worker programs or temporary visas for the millions of undocumented workers who power the agriculture and services industries.
But the ideas have always fizzled due to hardline conservatives who have maintained that border security must come first before any comprehensive deal is hatched.
The issue of how far Immigration and Customs Enforcement will go in removing undocumented residents crystallized this week when a senior Trump administration told NBC News that nearly half of those detained on Sunday’s arrest raids did not have criminal records.
Nor Paul or Mitch McConnell have commented on the daily ICE raids.
There have been no specific reports of such large-scale raids in Kentucky, but federal immigration authorities did arrest at least one man in Central Kentucky earlier this week. Agents said they were “operating under executive order from President Trump,” the man’s lawyer, John Reynolds, told the Herald-Leader.
Some community members have expressed anxiety about the potential of raids, and school districts have begun preparing staff for what to do if ICE agents arrive on campus.
ICE had made 5,537 arrests during the first eight days of the Trump presidency, according to numbers released Wednesday.
‘A little hard to say’
Paul also initially broke with Trump’s idea to use the U.S. military for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, saying such enforcement should remain under civilian authorities.
But in the interview with The Herald-Leader, the senator tempered his critique, anticipating that the Trump administration would use emergency powers to further activate military forces.
“I think they’re going to use different authorities to use the active military. If the active military is deployed at the border to stop people from breaking into the country, it’s a little hard for me to argue against it being used in that way,” said Paul.
“It’s not my preference, but it’s a little hard to say you can’t place people at the border of our country to stop people from illegally coming in, particularly since some of these people are frankly a threat to our domestic security but even our national security.”
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the administration began employing U.S. military aircraft, such as C-17 planes, to expedite the removal of migrants to countries including Guatemala and Colombia. This approach was part of a broader strategy to intensify immigration enforcement following a declared national emergency at the southern border.
Internationally, this policy has led to early diplomatic tensions.
Colombia initially refused to allow U.S. military planes carrying deported nationals to land, resulting in a standoff that was eventually resolved after Trump threatened to slap tariffs on the Latin American country.
This story was originally published January 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘You get to work’: Rand Paul offers a middle ground on Trump’s deportation spree."
