Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to round up all illegal immigrants hiding in the United States and ship ’em all back to their home countries.

He’ll do it humanely.

Sure, Donald.

We tried that once in this country. President Dwight Eisenhower — one of the better presidents this country ever elected — launched Operation Wetback in the 1950s.

The program didn’t work too well.

It carried a disparaging name attached to Mexican immigrants. Agents fanned out across the country and rounded up the immigrants, sent them to detention centers and then shipped them off. Many of those individuals died while being held or while they fended for themselves under terrible conditions.

Trump has used the program as a benchmark for the kind of initiative he said he would launch if — perish the thought — he were to be elected president of the United States next year. At least he doesn’t identify it by the name it was given when Ike decided on the immigrant roundup.

President Obama, interviewed tonight on ABC News, talked about the images that would be flashed around the world as “deportation agents” took parents away from their children and prepared to send them back to their native country.

“That’s not who we are,” the president said.

No, it is not.

But yet, Trump continues to gain traction with his party’s primary voter base by declaring his intention to hire 25,000 officers and deploy them to hunt down every single one of the estimated 11 million individuals who are here illegally.

Is the leading GOP candidate seeking to redefine this country?