Supporters rally to back Venezuela government’s crackdown on migrants

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7. To imagine Trump's mass deportation, look at Venezuela.

Memo to Trump: This is what mass deportation looks like

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Boys carry their belongings as they cross the Tachira river border into Colombia from Venezuela, near Colombia's Villa del Rosario village, August 27, 2015.

It’s hard to imagine what it (a Trump-style mass deporation) would look like — would there be, as journalist and recent Trump foil Jorge Ramos suggested in a op-ed, soldiers, police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, “raiding homes, workplaces and schools,” in “brutal raids” across an imaged "Trump-land," or would President Trump find another way to carry out his strategy?

This week, a glimpse of what a mass deportation could look like came from an unexpected source: Venezuela, where President Nicholas Maduro ordered that Colombians living in border towns be deported. Maduro alleges that they are responsible for cross-border smuggling and joining para military gangs. Critics quickly seized on the similarities between Maduro’s policy and Trump’s approach, with one Twitter using saying the only difference between the two was the color of their hair.

Most Colombian deportees had been living in shanty towns located just across the border, where they lived illegally. Deportees said that they were expelled abruptly by Venezuelan National Guardsmen who searched for immigrants home by home, and rounded them up, without giving them a chance to explain why they were in the country, or even an opportunity to pack their things.

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro said that he expelled Colombians who were living along the border because they were responsible for smuggling subsidized goods across the border and joining right wing paramilitary groups that extort local businesses. But deportees tell another story. Jose Ayala said he had been working in Venezuela as a cook. "I burnt my hands for the past 12 years... and now we have been kicked out like dogs," he said.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-08-28/memo-trump-what-mass-deportation-looks

"Our economic problems are the fault of poor illegal immigrants. When I become president they will be gone."

It has a familiar ring to it.