A Democrat has invoked the first lady to torch President Donald Trump’s assertion that ICE raids are not going far enough.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, who represents a portion of Los Angeles devastated by raids this year, expressed shock that Trump, 79, still wants ICE to turn things up a notch.
Gomez posted Monday: “Haven’t gone far enough?? Any further, and ICE will be deporting Melania…”
First Lady Melania Trump, 55, was born in Slovenia. She moved to the United States in 1996.
Melania became a U.S. citizen in 2006, a year after marrying Trump. As such, she cannot be deported—though her husband has flirted with the idea of flying American citizens to hellhole prisons abroad, like in El Salvador.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Gomez’s post.
Gomez was quote-tweeting a segment from Trump’s heavily edited interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday.
CBS host Norah O’Donnell said then, “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”
Trump answered without hesitation: “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by [former presidents Joe] Biden and by [Barack] Obama.”
The president continued by saying he was OK with the violent tactics—like bursting through doors, teargassing protesters, smashing car windows, and raiding apartment buildings in the dead of night—being used by federal agents.
“You have to get the people out,” he said. “You know, you have to look at the people. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are people that were thrown out of their countries because they were, you know, criminals.”
The overwhelming majority of those swooped up by ICE in recent months are migrants who have not committed a crime in their home country or in the United States. One of his top advisers, Stephen Miller, even ordered that ICE send its agents specifically to Home Depot locations in search of day laborers trying to provide for their families.
O’Donnell pushed back against Trump’s claim that ICE is only targeting the worst of the worst—a somewhat rare fact check in the interview, which has been criticized as being too soft on the president and as being edited to exclude some of his bizarre comments.
“A lot of the people that your administration has arrested and deported aren’t violent criminals,” she pointed out. “[They are] landscapers, nannies, construction workers, the families of service members.”
She continued, “Is it your intent to deport people who do not have a criminal record?”
Trump answered, “We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be, you came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out. However, you’ve also seen—you’re going to go out. We’re going to work with you, and you’re going to come back into our country legally.”
Despite Trump’s claim, there have been no publicized instances of the Trump administration working with deportees to return them to the United States.
Instead, the administration has imprisoned migrants like Kasper Eriksen, a Denmark-born father of four whose wife and children are American. Eriksen lives in Mississippi, publicly praised Trump on social media, and worked legally as a welder while pursuing naturalization, with agents taking him into custody as he showed up to his citizenship interview. He has been held in a rural Louisiana prison since April.
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