Buffalo New York Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY) was the first member of Congress to endorse presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and he’s become a key campaign surrogate for the reputed billionaire businessman. But in a Tuesday interview with The Buffalo News, Collins said he believed two of Trump’s signature campaign proposals would never be carried out.

Collins said he believed the wall Trump promised to build along the US-Mexico border would be more an idea than a physical wall. “I have called it a virtual wall. Maybe we will be building a wall over some aspects of it; I don’t know.”

Collins also said that Trump’s controversial plan to deport roughly 3% of the current US population would be a “rhetorical” exercise rather than a physical deportation.

From The Buffalo News …

“I call it a rhetorical deportation of 12 million people,” Collins said. He then gestured toward a door in his Capitol Hill office. “They go out that door, they go in that room, they get their work papers, Social Security number, then they come in that door, and they’ve got legal work status but are not citizens of the United States,” Collins said. “So there was a virtual deportation as they left that door for processing and came in this door.” Collins added: “We’re not going to put them on a bus, and we’re not going to drive them across the border.”

Collins went on to say that he was sure Trump would deny these plans. But he was nonetheless confident that Trump’s bold assertions were merely opening gambits in a long negotiation.