Jacksonville leaders slam Mayor Deegan for controversial comments on Trump immigration policy on London radio show

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan faced backlash from Republican city leaders on Wednesday following her comments on a London radio show about the immigration policy proposed by presidential candidate Donald Trump.

During an interview on Times Radio, the Democrat mayor was asked about Trump’s immigration plan by the host and likened it to a “concentration camp type situation.”

Last week, Trump announced that as president he’d launch “Operation Aurora” to focus on deporting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA. The violent gang traces its origins more than a decade to an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals.

Trump also repeated his pledge to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen who is from a country that the U.S. is at war with. It has not been used in the United States since World War II and during the War of 1812 before then.

“To put people in what would really amount to a concentration camp-type situation to round them out of the country doesn’t seem to me to be a very American thing to do,” Deegan said during the interview that was posted to X.

The host went on to say that some polls suggest that many Americans support mass deportations.

“Across America, there seems to be a very large slice of people, and some, I imagine in your city too, you’ve got a very mixed demographic,” the host said.

“I’m sure that there would be some people that would probably be for that,” Deegan responded. “I would just say that Jacksonville and the United States as a whole, is, we are a community and a nation of immigrants and I would hope that people would say, yes, we absolutely must fix the broken immigration system, let’s pass a tough border law, but to put people in what would really amount to a concentration camp type situation, to round them out of the country, doesn’t seem to me to be a very American thing to do.”

“The use of the term concentration camp is loaded. You consider that’s completely justified?” the host responded.

“What would we call them? If you’re rounding people up and putting them in camps, what? What would we call those? It’s a concentration of people that are in a camp. I’m not suggesting anything beyond that, but I just think, I think it seems rather inhumane to me,” Deegan said.

Sheriff Waters, a Republican, was one the first to come out publicly and criticize Deegan for her comments in a long statement on X.

“Mayor Deegan’s statement to The Times (London) regarding President Trump’s border and immigration policy are shocking and reckless. As the Sheriff of Jacksonville, it is disappointing to see our Mayor equate a commonsense immigration policy with one of the most horrific atrocities of the 20th century,” Waters wrote, in part.

Multiple Republican members of the Jacksonville City Council also addressed her comments. Councilman Terrance Freeman said the sheriff “is right,” called Deegan’s comments deeply troubling and said she needs to retract her statements.

“Words matter,” Councilman Ron Salem said in a statement. “In my home, and all over the globe, the phrase concentration camp has one meaning. Some of the darkest days in our world’s history that will plague history books for centuries. Comparing illegal immigration policies to the mass annihilation of our Jewish brothers and sisters is grossly inappropriate and should be apologized for.”

But when News4JAX asked Deegan for her response to the Republican backlash, she stood firm.

“When you flat out call a group of human beings animals and say they are poisoning the blood of our country, then promise to round them up in detention camps, what would lead anyone to believe they’d be treated humanely? The inevitable human rights abuses that would come are un-American and go against our country’s values,” Deegan said in a statement.

Councilman Jimmy Peluso called the response from Republicans “fake outrage.”

“It’s fake outrage day in Jax! Our Mayor answered a question truthfully; Trump’s immigration plan feels like Japanese internment & local Rs claim it’s a good idea,” Peluso posted on X.

News4JAX Political Analyst Rick Mullaney said with the election coming up, passions are running high.

“Twenty days out from an election, the timing of this interview was such that it was going to get a strong reaction. Yeah, this is a high-stakes election. It’s less than three weeks away. Immigration is a really important issue, and the language used was very strong that went, I think, beyond what she was trying to say, and it got a predictably strong response from those on the Republican side,” Mullaney said.

The Republican nominee for president has long promised to stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and has made immigration core to his political persona since launching his first campaign in 2015. In recent months, Trump has pinpointed specific smaller communities that have seen large arrivals of migrants, with tensions flaring locally over resources and some longtime residents expressing distrust about sudden demographic changes.

Aurora, Colorado entered the spotlight in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan migrants. Trump has claimed extensively that Venezuelan gangs are taking over buildings, even though authorities say that was a single block of the suburb near Denver, and the area is again safe.

“We have to clean out our country,” Trump said. And he reprised the first controversy of his career in politics, when he launched his 2016 campaign by saying migrants are rapists and bring drugs and crime.

“I took a lot of heat for saying it, but I was right,” Trump said Friday, repeating the false claim that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and dumping their worst criminals in the United States.