US election 2016: Trump, Shifting Tone, Says He Will Be ‘Fair’ on Immigration.

Donald J. Trump, tempering the tone of his hard-line approach to tackling immigration reform, said on Monday that he wants to come up with a plan that is “really fair” to address the millions of undocumented immigrants now in the country.

The softer comments from Mr. Trump, who is planning a major immigration speech this week, follow months of vows to build a wall along the southern United States border with Mexico and deport immigrants who have entered the country illegally. The strategy was a centerpiece of the platform that helped propel Mr. Trump to winning the Republican presidential nomination.

Asked on Fox News if he was flip-flopping on his immigration ideas, Mr. Trump insisted that he still intends to be “strong” while emphasizing the importance of fairness.

“We want to come up with a really fair, but firm, answer,” Mr. Trump said. “It has to be firm. But we want to come up with something fair.”

Mr. Trump’s different tone could be an attempt to court moderate Republican voters disturbed by the candidate’s tough stances on immigration. His remarks come as recent polls have shown him falling behind Hillary Clinton in several swing states.

The campaign has sent out conflicting signals about whether Mr. Trump would actually change his proposals regarding immigration. Mr. Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, signaled over the weekend that the candidate has been rethinking his approach.

Pressed in an interview on CNN as to whether a deportation force was still on the table as a law enforcement measure, Ms. Conway danced around the question before demurring.

“To be determined,” she said.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump met with his newly formed Hispanic advisory council, and BuzzFeed reported that he expressed interest in finding a “humane and efficient” way to deal with undocumented immigrants that sounded at odds with his previous plan to remove them from the country.

During his primary campaign, Mr. Trump assailed all his Republican rivals for being too weak on immigration. He kicked off his campaign saying that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists into the country, vowed that Mexico would pay for his planned border wall, and called for the “mandatory return of all criminal aliens.”

On Sunday, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a staunch ally and adviser to Mr. Trump on immigration, said that he was not aware of the Republican nominee changing his policy on border security, but that he is reconsidering how to handle the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States.

“Well, he’s wrestling with how to do that,” Mr. Sessions said on CBS.

The new tone from Mr. Trump comes as be continues to struggle mightily in the polls with nonwhite voters. Since reshuffling his campaign leadership last week, Mr. Trump has already expressed “regret” for remarks that he has made during the campaign that might have been hurtful, and he expanded his outreach to black voters. While it may be too late to win over skeptical Hispanic voters, expressing the desire to be more fair could still help Mr. Trump with swing voters.

Last November, Mr. Trump was explicit in his desire to deport.

“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” he told MSNBC.

SOURCE: MSNBC.