At a Congressional Progressive Caucus press briefing on Tuesday, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) spoke about the Trump Administration’s mass deportation goals.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Could you talk about how the Progressive Caucus policy agenda will address immigration just given House Republicans, in addition to tax cuts, want to boost more funding for border security and GOP-led states like Texas support these efforts?
00:17The Progressive Caucus recognizes that Democrats can actually go on the office on issues of immigration. The vast majority of the American people today do not believe that we should be sending people from this country to a prison camp in El Salvador run by a dictator.
00:36The vast majority of the American people are opposed to these mass deportation efforts where you have U.S. citizen kids with cancer being deported, and then the president and his White House continuing to lie about it.
00:51And so I refuse to believe that Democrats should just follow whatever poll there was from the last election.
00:59The American people know and believe that we're a country of immigrants, and that immigrants make us stronger, and that these mass deportation plans are deeply dangerous.
01:09And so the Progressive Caucus is going to continue to advocate for us to actually have a humane and orderly and safe immigration system.
01:19What the Republican Caucus has done, and what Trump campaigned on, was breaking our immigration system and then complaining about it being broken, and then burning it down more.
01:27We can't keep being in a situation where the arsonists come and blame the firefighters for the flames.
01:34I think that if we win back the House and then are able to actually have rational people in the White House, it's on us to finally have a comprehensive reform of our immigration system where, yes, we have safety and order,
01:48but we also should have a real path for the folks that have been here for years in places like Texas and California and New Mexico to have some certainty and to have some humanity because it's not just the rights of immigrants that are under a threat.
02:03If he, when people like Donald Trump, undermine the rights first of immigrants, next he starts to undermine the rights of legal permanent residents, next he's undermining the rights of U.S. citizens with immigrant parents, next he's coming for your rights, no matter who you are or where you come from.
02:20And I think that needs to be the message on offense from the Progressive Caucus.
02:24I want to also add that I want to call BS on the immigration deployment that Donald Trump is doing because as a representative from a border state,
02:37I can tell you that our governor and our elected officials actually asked the Trump administration for support with the real issues that our state is dealing with with the border.
02:46And that is namely fentanyl and the illicit trafficking of drugs and human trafficking that is, of course, dangerous to all individuals.
02:57And not only did he not send a single Border Patrol agent to come help with that or dollar or piece of technology,
03:03he instead asked our governor to use our National Guard resources to support his mass deportations.
03:10So I think it's important that we not validate what he's doing on the border because it's all smoke and mirrors and, frankly, you know, Christie known cosplaying.
03:20Like, this is not real.
03:22They're not actually addressing the fundamental issues, and I believe that is why the American people are saying we reject how you're handling immigration
03:30because not only is it violating due process and the normal process by which asylum and other cases get processed and fears it's creating for American citizens,
03:41they're not dealing with the actual real problems like drug and human trafficking on the border.
03:46So it's a lot of bullshit.
03:48Last question.