Advisers pass the buck on Trump policies

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump isn’t making it easy for top supporters and advisers to defend him or explain his positions on immigration.

Across the Sunday news shows, a parade of Trump stand-ins led by vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence couldn’t say whether Trump was sticking with or changing a central promise to boot the roughly 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally with the help of a “deportation force.”

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus demurred: “I just don’t speak for Donald Trump.”

The very purpose of surrogates is to speak for and back up their presidential nominee.

Asked whether the “deportation force” proposal Trump laid out in November is still in place, Pence replied: “Well, what you heard him describe there in his usual plain-spoken, American way was a mechanism, not a policy.”

The Indiana governor said the main tenets of Trump’s immigration plan will include building a wall along the southern U.S. border and making Mexico pay for it, no path to legalization or citizenship for people living in the U.S. illegally and stronger border enforcement. Pence also did not answer whether the campaign believes, as Trump has said, that children born to people who are in the U.S. illegally are not U.S. citizens. That, he said, “is a subject for the future.”

Trump has focused lately on deporting people who are in the U.S. illegally and who have committed crimes. But who Trump considers a criminal remained unclear Sunday.

Trump in recent days has suggested he might be “softening” on the deportation force and he might be open to allowing at least some illegal immigrants in the country to stay as long as they pay taxes.

But by Thursday, he was ruling out any kind of legal status.