Tim Murtaugh, a Trump 2024 senior adviser, told Newsmax on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s plan to pay illegal aliens $1,000 each to self deport back to their home countries is “a win all the way around.”
“The cost savings is pretty clear – $13,500 in savings to the American taxpayer for each illegal alien that self-deports,” Murtaugh said on “Wake Up America.” “That is pretty remarkable. Multiply that times the tens of millions of illegal aliens that we know we’ve got, and that’s a pretty significant savings to the taxpayers.”
Murtaugh then cited a post on X in which the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, laid out the choices available to people who are in the U.S. unlawfully.
“You can either self-deport, take your free plane ride and your $1,000 self-deportation bonus, or you can try to stick it out and undergo arrest and incarceration and forced deportation, and surrender all of your assets and get sent to a country of their choosing, that is, of the United States government’s choosing, at a time of their choosing, so they never know when and where it will happen, or even indeed where they’re going,” Murtaugh said. “And they’ll basically lose everything here in this country that they amassed while they were in the country illegally.
“So, it’s a pretty easy choice. I would say take the free plane ride and the thousand bucks and be on your way.
“I think this is a masterful plan from the Trump administration, because it’s pretty hard for the opponents of cleaning up the illegal immigration system, pretty hard for those opponents to say this is draconian when they’re throwing money at these folks and giving them a free plane ride home. I think it’s a great plan.”
Despite the resistance of the MAGA base to giving illegal immigrants free handouts, Murtaugh said he thinks the cost savings to taxpayers will ultimately win them over.
“We have tens of millions of illegal aliens who are already here and it is really a very important project that the Trump administration is undertaking in sending them all back to where they came from, to their native countries,” he said. “It’s not as easy as just saying, OK, you know what? Let’s just go round them all up. In many cases, the government doesn’t know where these folks are.
“They have gone into the country and they have disappeared. … This is a win all the way around. If you have people raising their hand and volunteering and saying, Me, take me, I’ll go back to my home country, I mean, truly, that is the best of both worlds.”
Murtaugh also commented on Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz federal prison, calling it a “pretty neat idea.”
“Reopening it and using it again and having it serve, yet again, back to its original history as a reminder of the cost of breaking the law, and, in particular, the cost of breaking the law in the worst ways imaginable, I mean, I think, just for image sake, it would be great to have Alcatraz operating again as a full-time active prison,” Murtaugh said.
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