Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk expressed frustration on Monday about Republicans allegedly pressuring President Donald Trump to pursue amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Trump said during a Thursday speech that his administration was “working on legislation” to help farmers and leisure businesses keep their illegal immigrant labor after U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins told him that farmers were struggling with losing workers. Kirk, on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” warned that Trump implementing amnesty would be a catastrophic error for the Republican Party.
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“If you want to break our coalition, go and push amnesty. That right there would be a complete collapse of everything that we have worked for — everything,” Kirk said. “So we don’t know any details, but it looks as if President Trump might be in preliminary discussions and I can tell you that there are many different discussions that I’ve had with people and they are pushing it hard — to create some kind of amnesty proposal aimed specifically at farm laborers in the United States — but it’s more than that. It could be hotels, it could be leisure properties. We’ve heard the arguments about this for years. Well, the crops are going to rot in the fields, they’ll be starvation.”
Kirk also said people have been pushing him to support amnesty personally. He expressed particular dismay about the fact that it was occurring after Trump signed his “big, beautiful” bill into law on Friday, which significantly boosts funding for immigration enforcement.
“The corporate class is deathly afraid that they might actually have to hire Americans and pay a higher wage. Somehow, other countries are able to grow food without imported serf labor. How are they able to do that? I don’t know,” he added. “Apparently, we have built so many parts of our economy to be reliant on foreign criminal invaders that have come into this country. And some people, ‘Oh, we have to allow farmers to transition.’ No, you deport them back to their country of origin. All of them. We did not run on mass amnesty. We ran on mass deportations.”
Trump pledged during his 2024 presidential campaign to conduct mass deportations if reelected.
“We tried the transition argument. And we are told, ‘Hey, if we do this, Hispanics will vote Republican for a generation. Hispanics will vote right-wing for a generation.’ And Ronald Reagan tried this in 1986,” Kirk said. “And what is so frustrating, it’s just unspeakably frustrating — we are winning Hispanics in a way we’ve never won them before because we are so firm on immigration! It was running against amnesty that got us Hispanic support.”
“And I don’t want to hear about people say, ‘Well, this is how we beat the Democrats.’ We just beat the Democrats! We know how to beat them,” he added. “Don’t tell me — the Karl Rove’s of the world — ‘Well, now here’s how I beat the Democrats.’ Everything you have suggested the last 20 years has been wrong on trade, on immigration, on the deep state, on the administrative state. Everything you have suggested on the Iraq war, on foreign policy, it’s all been wrong of the Karl Rove’s of the world.”
Kirk asserted he trusts Trump to mostly resist efforts to persuade him on amnesty and that perhaps the president was merely testing out the idea at his Thursday speech.
“This is a red line,” Kirk said. “Amnesty is a red line.”
The USDA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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