Lindsey Graham Fully Embraces Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan He Once Called “Xenophobic”

Co-Sponsor to the Dream Act, Sen. Graham adopts the plan to deport Dreamers.

In January of 2013, Lindsey Graham announced he was part of a Senate coalition that was drafting comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would end up drafting bipartisan legislation that created a pathway to citizenship for millions of our long-settled undocumented neighbors alongside increased border surveillance measures. A decade later, Graham is calling from a spectacle of their mass deportation. “The only policy change that will work is to have mass deportations,” Graham said this week.   

“I hope the third time is the charm,” Graham  said, striking the optimistic tone in the air in Washington in 2013. “I have enjoyed working with my Senate colleagues in drafting these principles and believe we are off to a good start. The bipartisan immigration principles represent a real breakthrough on substance and I hope they will be seen as a breakthrough in forming a political coalition to finally solve our immigration problems.” 

He later joined his fellow GOP Senators John McCain, Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio, as lead sponsors of Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration reform legislation, which included a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. On the heels of another electoral loss, the leading faction of the Republican Party saw the writing on the wall calling for embracing a legislative agenda that would broaden the appeal of the party, of which immigration reform was a key part. 

With the prevailing mood in the Party, it wasn’t surprising that Graham was a co-sponsor. He’d long been working with McCain on solutions, even rejecting the concept of mass deportation in 2010, saying that “if the definition of amnesty is you got to deport twelve million people, or put twelve million people in jail, then we’ll never have a comprehensive solution, because that’s just not workable, it’s not practical.”

Shortly after the bill was introduced, Graham spoke at an event in his home state where he said, “America is ‘a land of immigrants,’” adding, “An American is an idea. It’s not a race or one group. It’s not a religion, it’s an idea. The good news is that a lot of people will buy into this idea. The bad news is, more people want to buy into it than we can afford to bring in in an orderly fashion. That’s why you need a new immigration system.”

A group supporting immigration reform ran an ad supporting Graham’s role, featuring Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce President Bryan Derreberry saying,"South Carolina businesses will not be able to continue to grow without real immigration solutions. Senator Graham is right on target in fighting for immigration reform today."

The bill passed the Senate in June of 2013 by a vote of 68-32. 

However, it never got a vote in the House, as the nativist goon squad that would go on to form the core of Trump’s 2016 political campaign, like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Sen. Jeff Sessions, worked up a nationalist fever among the Republican House.      

With the nationalists ascendant in the party, Jeff Flake was run out of the Senate by Trump. McCain is dead – along with Graham’s convictions. The South Carolina senator and Rubio have survived by toadying up to their party’s leader and completely abandoning their earlier support for immigrants. (We did a deep dive into Rubio’s betrayal of his pro-immigrant past – which he did against his mother’s wishes – here.)

But, the trajectory of Graham’s obsequiousness and stomach-churning fealty to Trump (who can forget when Graham made a public spectacle of himself during the confirmation hearings for one of his extreme Supreme Court nominees?) has long been a topic of conversation. But his descent on immigration is especially striking. From John McCain’s ally on reform to a proponent of mass deportation for the millions of families he once claimed to champion.

Back in July of 2015, shortly after Donald Trump announced his campaign with a vicious attack on immigrants, Graham was still willing to challenge Trump. “I think [Donald Trump is] uninformed about the situation regarding the illegal immigrant population,” he said. “I think he has hijacked the debate. I think he is a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican party with the Hispanic community and we need to push back.” A few months later, in December of 2015, he said a Trump nomination “would be an utter, complete and total disaster. If you’re a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot, you’re going to have a hard time being president of the United States, and you’re going to do irreparable damage to the party.”

That was then. This is now, where Graham is happy to dress up and play whatever part to catch some glow off the main spotlight. 

This week, Graham, at a press conference with fellow Republicans, announced his unwavering support for Trump’s diabolical plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants:

They will keep coming until they see people leaving. [Trump] told me this morning, when he gets to be president, not only is he gonna secure the border, he’s going to deport hundreds of thousands of people here illegally. And if you wanna shut down illegal immigration, those coming need to see an outflow by the tens and hundreds of thousands. That will deter. The only policy change that will work is to have mass deportations. Because people will stop coming when they see people leaving.

Writing at MSNBC, in an article with the subhead, “South Carolina's senator almost sounded giddy Tuesday as he imagined how a Trump administration would deport hundreds of thousands of people,” Ja’han Jones wrote, "Graham’s comments would have you believe that the cruel spectacle of millions of people being drummed out of the country is the only way to resolve immigration issues.”

So the same Graham who said in 2013, “I’m not doing immigration reform to solve the Republican Party’s political problem. I’m trying to save our nation from, I think, a shortage of labor and a catastrophic broken system” is now supporting Trump’s plan that will wreak havoc on communities, families and the economy to support the main political agenda of the Republican Party’s nominee. 

As has been widely reported, the deportation plans are not a pipe dream or campaign rhetoric. Trump’s minions, led by noted white nationalist Stephen Miller, have very concrete plans for how they will carry out this massive operation, as Radley Balko explained at The Watch:

In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

Here is a snippet of that interview:

That’s what Lindsey Graham supports. 

It should be noted that in October of 2023, Graham again co-sponsored the Dream Act. Under Trump’s mass deportation plan, instead of “relief for Dreamers,” they are all at risk of deportation.

In a statement, Vanessa Cardenas of America’s Voice laid out the stakes, “Like Marco Rubio – another previous supporter of immigrants – Lindsey Graham is embracing incalculable damage to the nation by supporting Trump’s mass deportation plans. Trump’s deportation force would go after Dreamers, TPS holders, health care and agriculture workers, to name a few. 80% of the people that Trump wants to target are embedded into the social fabric of our nation as they have lived in the country since at least 2010.”

Exactly.

This is not the first time Graham has embraced some of the worst anti-immigrant rhetoric. He was also one of the first mainstream Republican members of Congress to embrace the rhetoric of the white nationalist replacement theory back in the summer of 2021. He helped push that into the GOP bloodstream. Now, he’s doing it with mass deportation. 

On July 19, 2021, Graham appeared on his former girlfriend Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News to oppose an effort by Democrats to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders, farmworkers, and other essential workers in the infrastructure bill. On the show, he declared his newfound hardline opposition to legal status for the same immigrants he’d supported in the past. He did this by using talking points peddled by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated hate group.

On the show, Graham said, “Amnesty in the Democrat infrastructure bill that will lead to an invasion.” He eagerly echoed that dangerous talking point despite its white nationalist origins and its track record of violence, including deadly massacres in Pittsburgh and El Paso. 

Graham took the lead in pushing the dangerous lie of a looming migrant “invasion,” and now he’s giddily embracing mass deportation. What wasn’t “practical” for Graham in the past is now “the only policy change that will work.” You gotta wonder: what would McCain, who Trump mocked unceasingly, have to say about all this today?

Back in 2019, Frank Sharry, then-Executive Director of America’s Voice, who had worked with Graham for years, said, “Lindsey Graham used to courageously stand shoulder to shoulder with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to fight for good policy and bipartisan breakthroughs, even if it meant taking on nativists in his own party. But those days of courage and conviction are distant memories.”

Very very, very distant. Dangerously so.

WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE 

• 180 Republican ads running with immigration-related attacks on TV and CTV 

  • Total spending on nativist ads for the week of May 24th -- $180,705,684 (AdImpact)

  • 19 new Republican-aligned immigration-related Facebook ads

• Year to date:

  • Total nativist TV and CTV ads: 878

  • Total spend on nativist TV and CTV ads --- $181,125,348 (AdImpact)

Nativist Ad of the Week

In the Republican Primary in Arizona Senate, Kari Lake has a new TV ad in conjunction with the NRSC attacking her Democrat opponent, Ruben Gallego because he “supports amnesty for millions of illegals and allowing them to vote opposed efforts to secure our border.”

Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent: 

• 795 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”

• 171 original tweets about “open borders,” with Sen. Marsha Blackburn tweet having the most reach with 389.6K Views, 11k Retweets, and 27.8k Likes.

• 55 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Gov. Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 72.5K Views, 704 Retweets, and 4.6k Likes.

• 15 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Kari Lake tweet having the most reach with 98.5K views, 250 Retweets and 733 Likes.