In USA, Undocumented DOES Mean Illicit: Trump

Undocumented artefacts
and those 'American values'?

In a "60 Minutes" interview scheduled to air Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to immediately repatriate two to three million undocumented antiquities to their source countries after his inauguration next January (Amy Wang, 'Donald Trump plans to immediately deport 2 to 3 million undocumented antiquities' 13th November 2016):

"What we are going to do is go after the antiquities that are traded by people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these objects, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country and we are going to incarcerate people," Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. "But we’re getting the undocumented antiquities out of our country. They’re here illegally." Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to deport "millions and millions of undocumented antiquities." Trump told her that after securing the border, his administration would make a "determination" on the remaining undocumented artefacts in the country. "After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the antiquities that they’re talking about — which are terrific antiquities. They’re terrific artefacts, but we are gonna make a determination at that,” Trump said. “But before we make that determination...it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.” His comments echoed those he had made at the start of his campaign: "When Mexico sends its antiquities, they're not sending their best," Trump had said last June when he announced his candidacy. "They're not sending you. They're not sending you. These dealers are sending artefacts that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. These people are also bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Now that's actually not precisely what the controversial orange attention-seeker said, but it makes about as much sense as his actual incoherent message as reported in the original. The point is that Trump-supporting antiquities dealers try to claim (in flagrant denial of art 3 of the 1970 Convention, 'implemented' by the US) that somehow undocumented artefacts are all licit. But under US law, an undocumented human being in the USA now no longer will be considered as such - and where is 'innocent until proven guilty' there, Mr Trump? And how do the dealers and their lobbyists imagine securing the border against these illicit undocumented aretefacts, if not requiring importers to show the dcumentation? In other words, exactly what the CCPIA requires at present.