Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk has warned President Donald Trump that giving amnesty to migrants working in the United States illegally would “break” the MAGA coalition.
In an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday, Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, said members of the “ruling class” were pressuring the Republican president to allow farmworkers to stay in the country.
“If you want to break our coalition, go and push amnesty,” Kirk said. “That right there would be a complete collapse of everything that we have worked for, everything.”
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email and Kirk on social media for comment.
Why It Matters
Trump has prioritized immigration enforcement since returning to office in January, after campaigning on a promise of mass deportations.
Last month, the president directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democrat-run cities after protests erupted in Los Angeles and other cities against the administration’s immigration policies.
But at the same time, he reportedly told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels amid alarm at the impact aggressive enforcement is having on industries that heavily rely on foreign workers. The administration later reversed that decision.
What To Know
Kirk pointed to comments Trump made during a speech in Iowa on Thursday, hours after Congress passed the president’s massive tax and spending bill.
In the speech, Trump said he was working on legislation that would allow migrant laborers to remain in the country if the farmers they work for would vouch for them.
“We gotta work with the farmers, and people that have hotels and leisure properties too,” the president said.
Trump said that “serious radical right people” may not appreciate the move, but “they’ll understand.”
Kirk said: “Look, I trust President Trump’s instincts 100 percent here, but there is a group of people that are pushing President Trump very hard to stop the deportation effort and to try to have some sort of a come-to-the-table moment of a bipartisan compromise. That we need to try to figure out how to make these people have a pathway to citizenship.”
He added: “We don’t know any of the details, but President Trump did say that the radical right people that he has a soft spot for wouldn’t like this. Hello, hi, I’m one of those radical right people. And I want to know what I’m not going to like.”
What People Are Saying
President Donald Trump said in Iowa on Thursday: “If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people in some way, Kristi (Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security), I think we’re going to have to just say that’s going to be good, right? You know, we’re going to be good with it ’cause we don’t want to do it where we take all of the workers off the farms.”
Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, on Monday’s episode of The Charlie Kirk Show: “You would think that, hey, we get $175 billion for ICE, we’re going to get mass deportations. We’re going to be able to have now the largest deportation effort ever. Yes, in theory, but in practice, there’s something else afoot.
“Literally the day before President Donald Trump was signing the ‘big beautiful bill,’ I got a couple phone calls from people that you would call members of the ruling class. A lot of money and a lot of connections. They said, ‘Charlie, isn’t this amazing? We passed the ‘big, beautiful bill.” I said, ‘Oh yes, sir.’ And they said, ‘Now, we need mass amnesty.'”
Maryland Representative Andy Harris, a Republican who chairs the House Freedom Caucus, told reporters last month: “There has to be an effort to figure out how to make sure that we have the workforce we need, whether it’s H-2A, H-2B, whether it’s, again, a different category that will result in having an adequate number of workers here in the United States to keep the economy going.”
What Happens Next
Trump has said that legislation is in the works to allow some migrant workers to remain in the country. However, it’s unclear when such legislation could be introduced.
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