President Donald Trump. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says he isn’t too concerned about President Donald Trump’s tweeted threat about mass deportations of undocumented immigrants across the country, saying the U.S. leader is just making noise to distract the public.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would begin “removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States” next week.
Speaking in Boston’s North End Tuesday, Walsh told WBZ NewsRadio’s Carl Stevens he thinks Trump is just trying to draw attention from some recent polling stories that show him in a negative light, like the Quinnipiac University poll that found six Democratic 2020 contenders are leading him.
“I think the President plays us all, including the press,” Walsh said. “There’s some poll numbers came out that, almost every single Democratic candidate’s beating him in the final—any time that he seems to be under any type of duress in his brain, he comes out with immigration stuff, and then we follow it and we chase it, and at the end of the day, nothing happens.”
Walsh said that in all the time Trump has held the nation’s highest office, he has done "nothing" to deal with immigration other than make threats to deport people, like the one this morning.
“First of all, he doesn’t have the authority to do that,” Walsh said. “Number two, he doesn’t have the people that can do that."
Walsh said that, should Trump act on his threat, his administration would not be assisting the federal government in rounding up immigrants.
“Certainly in Boston, we’re not going to be helping him going after undocumented immigrants,” Walsh said. “That’s not going to be the case.”
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WBZ NewsRadio's Carl Stevens (@carlwbz) reports