Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Wednesday night challenged Donald Trump over the Republican presidential candidate’s support for the deportation model used by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, noting that the former president’s removal of immigrants at the time was “brutal.”
O’Reilly first asked Trump if he knew what Eisenhower named the deportation program.
“I do but I don’t like the term. I wouldn’t use the term,” Trump responded, alluding to the program’s title, “Operation Wetback.” O’Reilly said he was referring to another name for the deportation effort, “bracero.”
The Fox host then lectured Trump about Eisenhower’s deportation process, through which the U.S. deported hundreds of thousand of immigrants, often under horrific conditions. American officials dropped many of the immigrants off in remote areas of Mexico without a way to get home, and some died in the sweltering heat.
“That was brutal what they did to those people to kick them back,” O’Reilly told Trump on Wednesday night. “The stuff they did was really brutal, it could never happen today.”
“I’ve heard it both ways. I’ve heard good reports. I’ve heard bad reports,” Trump said in response. “We would do it in a very humane way.”
O’Reilly then told Trump that while he supports the real estate mogul’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, he does not back Trump’s deportation plan.
“I also don’t think you could deport these people because the federal courts would stop you,” O’Reilly said, noting that the federal courts would require each individual be granted due process.
Watch O’Reilly’s interview with Trump via Fox News:
