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“What I want to do, and what I will do, is: You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

SO PROMISED DONALD TRUMP in June 2024. He was a guest on All-In, a podcast hosted by a group of Trump-friendly Silicon Valley figures, one of whom, David Sacks, had just held a $12 million fundraiser for Trump at his Pacific Heights home two weeks earlier. They wanted him to make it easier for the tech industry to “import the best and brightest” talents from around the world. He agreed, and promised that even immigrants who received two-year associate degrees would get green cards.

“I know of stories,” Trump said,

where people graduated from a top college . . . and they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, or a concept—and they can’t. They go back to India; they go back to China. They do the same basic company in those places, and they become multibillionaires, employing thousands and thousands of people. And it could have been done here.

“You have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people,” Trump continued. “Somebody graduates at the top of the class, they can’t even make a deal with a company because they don’t think they’re going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on Day One.”

So . . . how did that all turn out?

I hope you’re sitting down. Not only did Trump not make life easier for international graduates to stay in the United States on Day One, but he empowered his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, to systematically sabotage