Not ALL of them must go back

THERE MAY be a crack in Donald Trump’s wall.

The anti-immigrant GOP presidential candidate said his time on the campaign trail has made him sympathetic to the plight of many undocumented immigrants who have been in the country a long time.

The position veers from the tough-talking, wall-building Republican’s hate speech, though he insisted he’s not going soft on the hot-button immigration issue. Yet he did acknowledge there are good people who were in the country illegally.

“Now, everybody agrees we get the bad ones out,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity, in an interview that aired Wednesday night.

“But when I go through and I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject, and I’ve had very strong people come up to me, really great, great people come up to me, and they’ve said, ‘Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person who’s been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and their family out, it’s so tough, Mr. Trump.’ I have it all the time! It’s a very, very hard thing.”

Still, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, made no concession on the issue, and said there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, even if they have committed no crimes.

“No citizenship,” Trump said. “Let me go a step further — they’ll pay back taxes, they have to pay taxes, there’s no amnesty, as such, there’s no amnesty, but we work with them.”

Trump also dismissed the notion of “sanctuary cities.”

“We’re protecting criminals,” he said. “And the police, who are phenomenal people, they’re at a point where they almost give up.”

The near-reversal is a far cry from the early days of the GOP primaries, when Trump vowed to use a “deportation force” to round up and deport millions of people.