Donald Trump speaks at a rally in West Bend, Wisconsin. (Getty)
Donald Trump will finally be holding his highly-anticipated immigration speech on Wednesday, August 31st.
Trump’s event will take place at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona beginning at 6:00 p.m. Mountain Time, according to the campaign’s schedule. You can stream it online right here.
This comes at the end of a week-long period during which the Republican presidential nominee’s position on immigration grew increasingly unclear. During the primary season, Trump said that he wanted to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants from the country, after which “the good ones” could come back by going through the legal process.
But it appears that Trump may be leaning towards completely dropping this from his plan. In a recent town hall with Sean Hannity, Trump said that he is open to “softening” on immigration. He seemed to be extremely indecisive about the issue, polling the audience at the town hall event about what he should do.
“So you have somebody who’s been in the country for 20 years, has done a great job, and everything else,” Trump said. “Do we take him and the family and her and him or whatever and send him out?”
Trump’s question was not rhetorical, and he spent the next minute or so asking the audience various immigration-related questions and measuring their responses by applause.
He also said during that Fox News town hall that he would be coming to a decision about deportations very soon, and presumably this will be discussed in his immigration speech on Wednesday. When Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was recently asked if Trump would forcibly remove all undocumented immigrants from the country, she said that this was to be determined. And when Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, recently appeared on CNN, he had trouble getting into specifics about Trump’s immigration plan.
The Republican presidential nominee seems to be trying to appeal to general election voters without angering those supporters who got him this far in the first place. Some of those voters are already growing frustrated with Trump, with conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter being among them. She recently released a book called In Trump We Trust, in which she writes that the only thing Trump could do that would be unforgivable is change his immigration policy.
And in a series of tweets, she mocked some of Trump’s noncommittal statements on the issue, although she later downplayed the importance of Trump’s recent rhetoric.
“We’re getting a wall. We’re definitely getting a wall,” she said. “That’s the one thing we know about a Trump presidency.”