Trump’s Plan Is Already Working: Philippines Ambassador Urges Illegal Filipinos to Self-Deport Before It’s Too Late

When President-elect Donald Trump first entered the White House in 2017, few people — Trump included — knew what to expect.

Nearly eight years later, the president-elect has made his intentions clear, and sensible people have chosen to take him seriously.

According to KNBC in Los Angeles, Jose Manuel Ramualdez, the Philippines’ Ambassador to the United States, has advised Filipino illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. to leave the country before the incoming Trump administration can deport them.

“My advice to them is to immediately leave voluntarily because once you’re deported, you can never come back to the United States,” Ramuladez said in a recent news conference.

The ambassador did not have his facts correct. Generally speaking, deportation means at least a five-year ban on re-entry into the United States. Unauthorized re-entry following deportation carries the possibility of imprisonment.

Still, Ramuladez’s comments had a salutary effect.

According to a corresponding video report from KNBC, Romeo Hebron, executive director of the Filipino Migrant Center in Long Beach, California, Ramuladez’s warning triggered a flood of calls and walk-ins to the migrant center.

“The Philippine ambassador should not have said those things,” Hebron told KNBC, “because it causes unnecessary panic in our community.”

Hebron later estimated that one-fourth of the roughly four million Filipinos in the U.S. qualify as “undocumented.”

Without skipping a beat — or stopping to check his math — KNBC’s Mekahlo Medina said “that’s between two hundred and three hundred thousand Filipinos.”

Assuming the accuracy of Hebron’s estimate, of course, it actually means that one million Filipinos qualify as illegal immigrants.

For editorial purposes, local establishment media outlets, such as KNBC, have no more credibility than their national counterparts. The local outlets have proven willing to peddle the same dishonest narratives, for instance, by describing illegal immigrants as “undocumented.”

Moreover, KNBC’s entire report had a pro-migrant tone, emphasizing illegal immigrants with deep roots in America who now fear deportation.

Fortunately, however, the woke left’s relentless effort to weaponize compassion on behalf of lawbreakers has lost its former potency. Voters gave Trump a mandate in the 2024 election in part because they have grown tired of Democrats’ open-border policies.

Earlier this month, Trump half-jokingly suggested that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson should pass a bill declaring that the new Trump administration began on Nov. 5 or Nov. 6.

The president-elect meant, of course, that some good things will happen before his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.

Ramualdez’s advice that Filipino illegal immigrants should self-deport prior to Trump taking office falls under that heading.

After all, attentive Americans have heard the president-elect promise mass deportations and a secure border on many occasions. They have no reason not to take him seriously.

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