Nearly half of GOP voters support using the military to put immigrants in detention camps.
Almost half of Republican voters believe the U.S. military should round up undocumented immigrants and place them in detention camps until they can be deported, according to a new survey. President-elect Trump has suggested he will use the military for immigration raids and turn to a 1798 law to put immigrants in camps.
His base appears to support these plans, despite the likely fierce opposition from most Americans.
Forty-six percent of Republicans endorse using the military in mass deportation raids and placing immigrants in camps, according to a nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) post-election survey.
This is more than double the percentage of independent voters (19%) who agree with the idea.
It is also more than five times higher than the percentage of Democratic voters (8%) who support this policy.
“There have been questions in the Trump era where I’ve thought… I can’t believe we need to know the answer to this question,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, said.
“I guess the good news is that three-quarters of the country rejects the idea of putting immigrants who are in the country illegally into internment camps guarded by the military,” Jones added.
However, the bad news, he noted, is that nearly half of those who consider themselves members of a mainstream political party support the idea.
Trump mentioned in his recent TIME “Person of the Year” interview that he would be open to using camps to hold immigrants detained in the U.S.
In the TIME interview, Trump also suggested deporting 21 million people, which would likely require an increase in detention centers to hold individuals suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization before they are deported.
Study after study shows there are 11 million undocumented people in the country, not 21 million, as Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed.
There are roughly 24.5 million noncitizen immigrants in the U.S., including those here awaiting asylum decisions or otherwise legally residing, according to the Pew Research Center.
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