Geraldo Rivera Gives Trump His ‘Unequivocal’ Thoughts On ‘Horrifying’ Deportation Plan

Former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera on Tuesday condemned Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans as a “horror” that would “tarnish the reputation of the nation.”

On MSNBC’s “The Beat,” host Ari Melber questioned Rivera about Trump’s proposed immigration crackdown, which Rivera had repeatedly warned about prior to the election. The president-elect has said he is prepared to declare a national emergency and use military assets to enforce his mass deportation program once he takes office.

“What do you say to Donald Trump, someone who you knew for so many years tonight?” Melber asked.

“Well, I’m not sure he would take my advice on it, Ari, but let me be unequivocal about it,” Rivera said.

He described plans to send immigrants en masse to detention camps “so unpleasant that people will be dying to get out, to go home.”

He added, “I think that’s the thinking. It is an obscenity and everything I said pre-election, I say now in bold letters. This is horrifying, what they have planned.”

“Can you imagine a vast holding area?” he continued. “Just think of the Japanese internment in World War II. This is going to be that in a much faster scale, and the more people that they crowd into these places, the more horrifying it’s going to be, and it will weigh on the conscience of every American.”

He told the host, “When you can look through a barbed wire fence and you see people that look just like you, and many of them in the in the country for a long time, to people with the mixed families …”

Then he added, “This is going to be a horror, a horror! And it’s really going to, I think, tarnish the real, the reputation of the nation. Is there a problem with undocumented immigration? Obviously, but there must be a more humane solution than the one proposed.”

Rivera was friends with Trump for years but turned on the Republican after he refused to concede the 2020 election.

In October, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, calling Trump a “sore loser” and revealing they had last spoken when Trump called him at home on Nov. 13, 2020, for advice about the election.

Rivera has, however, been positive about some of Trump’s highly controversial Cabinet picks, saying on Monday he was “delighted” by the selection of some of his old associates from Fox News.