Vivek Ramaswamy, top Indian-American aid to President-elect Donald Trump, expressed his support for the mass deportation plan of illegal immigrants and said that the legal immigration system in the country is "broken".
He said that those who broke the law while entering the United States have no right to stay here and they need to go.
"Do we have a broken legal immigration system? Yes, we do. But I think the first step is going to be to restore the rule of law, to do it in a very pragmatic way,” entrepreneur turned-politician told ABC News in an interview.
“Those who have entered in the last couple of years, they haven't established roots in the country. Those who have committed a crime, should be out of this country. That is by the millions. That alone would be the largest mass deportation. Combine that with ending government aid for all illegals. You see self-deportations,” he said.
Ramaswamy appeared on multiple Sunday talk shows, the first after the stunning win of Donald Trump in the November 5 presidential elections. He told ABC News that he is having some “high impact” discussions on his future role in the administration, Congress of the party.
From being a rival of Trump during the Republican primaries, Ramaswamy has emerged as a staunch supporter and confidant of Trump.
“I think he cares about uniting the country. I think that is Donald Trump's number one focus. I do think we have to get back to a place after this election after that decisive victory, which I do think was a gift to the country, get back to a place where ordinary Americans who might have voted differently amongst their family members or their colleagues or their neighbours, to be able to get together at the dinner table and say, we're still Americans at the end of this, that's very much Donald Trump's headspace,” he said.
“He's also learned a lot from that first term, and I think he's going into this second term even to take to new heights some of the things he wasn't able to accomplish in the first term, which I think is going to be a good thing,” Ramaswamy said.
The Republican Party, he said, is now a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. “You saw black voters, Hispanic voters, young voters. That was a big one. A much younger composition of the Republican primary base came together on basic principles that really weren't as beholden to older Republican orthodoxies, but principles like free speech, anti-censorship, meritocracy, and staying out of World War III. These are some of the common threads that bring together what is a pretty diverse and broad tent coalition to restore those basic constitutional principles,” he said.
“Here's a big one. And Donald Trump talked for a long time about the deep state. But this idea of restoring self-governance is big in this new coalition. The idea that the people we elect to run the government, they haven't been the ones actually running the government for a very long time," Ramaswamy said.
"Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States in the real sense of that word. Capital P president where he is actually making the decisions with the democratic will of the people behind him, not the unelected bureaucratic class underneath him,” the Indian American said.
“That's something that unites a common thread of even former Democrats to independents, to libertarians, to, of course, traditional Republicans as well. I think that that's a common thread that unites us,” he said.
Trump, he said, is focused on what makes people's lives better. “And actually, my message to Democrats out there, even those who didn't vote for Donald Trump, is to give them a chance to actually make your life better. A lot of people across the country, even those who have bought into some false narratives about Donald Trump, are going to be pleasantly surprised to find more money in their paychecks, prices coming down in the country, and a secure border. Those are things most Americans actually care about,” Ramaswamy said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
