Oklahoma, led by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, plans to be among the first states to take advantage of President-elect Donald Trump's border mandates and empty the state's prisons of criminal illegal immigrants, the Washington Examiner reported on Friday.
Stitt spoke exclusively to the outlet and said that his state plans to deport more than 500 convicted illegal immigrants currently in Oklahoma prisons as soon as Trump takes office in January. "We want to be the first state that works with President Trump," Stitt said. "Right now, we have over 500 people incarcerated in Oklahoma who have broken the law, who are criminals, and they also are illegal," the governor added. "We would love to get them out of the state of Oklahoma, out of the country."
Trump has long positioned himself as a border hawk and has promised he will conduct mass deportations of illegal immigrants once elected. "We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country," Trump said last month during a speech in Los Angeles, California.