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unidentified
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At 7 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN Networks. | |
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| the historic date when the Continental Congress established the Continental Army and laid the foundation for America's national military force. | ||
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| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Representative Adriana Espeat. | ||
| You are the Democratic Caucus Senior Whip, I believe, Congressman. | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| And Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair, welcome to the program. | ||
| Just want to find out your reaction to the events of Los Angeles and your caucus' response. | ||
| Well, first and foremost, I want to say that we ask all protesters who obviously have a constitutional right to protest to do so obviously in peace, peacefully. | ||
| That is the only way that we're going to get social change is by engaging in peaceful protests. | ||
| We reject anybody that comes in and tries to take advantage of a meritorious debate and protest for social justice. | ||
| So we ask that first and foremost. | ||
| Secondly, we think that we got here when the administration began to aggressively deport working people. | ||
| Folks that went to a Home Depot looking for work. | ||
| Moms who were taking daughters and children to a hospital appointment, as I saw with four U.S.-born children, four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old little girl with a cancerous brain tumor, who were deported to Mexico when they were on their way to a hospital in Houston and were stopped at a checkpoint. | ||
| When people like a union leader, Mr. Huertas in Los Angeles gets stopped, cuffed, and arrested and put in a deportation track. | ||
| That's how we got here. | ||
| This is not just about violent criminals that went to court and were found guilty and should be deported. | ||
| We all agree with that. | ||
| This is about green car holders who are here legally. | ||
| This is about people who work permits, who are able to work legally in the United States. | ||
| And this is ultimately also about U.S. citizens that are being impacted dramatically by this aggressive mass deportation effort by the administration. | ||
| This is how we get here. | ||
| And furthermore, gas is thrown on top of the fire by moving military forces and the National Guard who are not necessarily trained or have the tools to deal with a local issue, a domestic issue that now obviously has escalated. | ||
| And Congressman, I mean, the administration says that the situation was not under control, that the governor and the local authorities were not able to maintain peaceful protests and to protect federal buildings and agents. | ||
| What's your response to that and that this was an appropriate use of federal power? | ||
| Well, first and foremost, we hear from the local authorities on the ground who very early on said they had everything under control. | ||
| The governor and the mayor said they had everything under control. | ||
| It is when the National Guard and the now the Marines showed up that it spiraled out of control. | ||
| And so we want to make sure that we listen to local authorities. | ||
| They are the ones that know the neighborhoods. | ||
| They are the ones that know the municipalities, the cities, the counties. | ||
| They're the ones that know the community organizations. | ||
| They're the ones that know the community. | ||
| First and foremost, they have deep knowledge of each of the neighborhoods. | ||
| And so we must listen to them. | ||
| And if they were telling us that it was under control, we should adhere to their wishes. | ||
| However, now it got spiral out of control when these federal forces came in. | ||
| Now, we went, we meeting the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, went to visit an ICE facility. | ||
| We heard that at the ICE facility, people that were trying to comply with the rules and regulations with the law, making a court appearance, an immigration court appearance, or visiting their ICE officer in a pre-scheduled appointment, were being arrested in the hallways, detained in an administrative building, not a detention center, and then put on track for deportation. | ||
| This was being done seven days a week. | ||
| So we went to look at the sites to make sure that the conditions were humane. | ||
| And we were not allowed in. | ||
| Ten of us were turned away from exercising our constitutional right to have oversight over federal agencies. | ||
| So we will continue to go back to ensure that everybody is complying with the law. | ||
| Representative Andreano Espeyat, a Democrat of New York, is with us until for about 20 minutes. | ||
| You can call us if you'd like to ask him a question. | ||
| Republicans are on 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Congressman, we are hearing that parts of New York City, parts of which that you represent, are having protests, immigration protests currently. | ||
| What are you hearing about that? | ||
| And what are you hearing from your constituents? | ||
| First and foremost, again, I want to ensure that everybody understands that we as Democrats reject violence in any protest, that our history has been one of peaceful demonstrations from the civil rights movement, from the movement, the suffrage movement by women, from even the immigration debate has been one that has been characterized by peaceful demonstration. | ||
| We're not supportive of violence. | ||
| Our communities in New York will reject any type of violence. | ||
| We will push back against it. | ||
| And we are, for the most part, I would say we are very supportive of law enforcement because it is law enforcement that's there with us in our communities to fight crime. | ||
| It is law enforcement that's there with us in our community to ensure that our children are safe. | ||
| It is law enforcement in our community that's there right next to us to ensure that our seniors on their way to church or on their way to the senior center are there in a safe manner. | ||
| So we have a great relationship, I believe, with law enforcement in our communities. | ||
| And law enforcement is made up for the most part of many of our kids, many of our sons and daughters, and we want them protected as well. | ||
| But we feel that the administration is aggressive. | ||
| Their tone is aggressive. | ||
| The president's tone and language is often over the top and aggressive. | ||
| And it's not really one that gives the people of our nation the ability to say that we're coming together. | ||
| In fact, what it looks like is that he's splitting us apart. | ||
| Let's talk to callers and go with Mickey in Tacoma Park, Maryland. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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How are you today? | |
| I've been listening for the last hour and a half to the programs that have been playing. | ||
| Everything, I just like to make a statement, not so much as a question, so that maybe you can relate it to your Democratic constituents. | ||
| That this act that happened in LA with the military popping up there and being dispatched there, I said he was going to do this six months ago through his campaign before he came president. | ||
| This time around, everything I said about this guy and everything he's been doing in the last 140 or 50 days has transpired up to the military going on the street. | ||
| We have approximately anywhere from two weeks to another month before this guy declares martial law, or maybe a few weeks longer. | ||
| But if you guys do not take off the white gloves and stop handling this guy like a fine piece of art, we're going to be dismantled, just like what happened in the Philippines. | ||
| And Mickey, what are you asking Congressional Democrats to do, actually? | ||
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unidentified
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It's time to go, everybody go to start bringing hearings to the Supreme Court, law cases, get him out of office before it gets any further. | |
| The 2025 plan has been devised by Putin and handed to him and his administration. | ||
| All right, let's go ahead and get a response, Congressman. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
| Well, I hear the caller. | ||
| You know, we are active in various fronts in the courts. | ||
| There's over 130 litigations going on right now challenging some very aggressive and we feel illegal executive orders. | ||
| We are also legislatively and budgetarily, every opportunity we get, we will confront his big ugly bill that proposes to cut your Medicaid, that proposes to cut your food stamps, that proposes to hurt seniors, veterans, children. | ||
| This is something that's very concerning to us because in the middle of this debate about Los Angeles and New York, everybody's forgetting the fact that he's taking your Medicaid away from you, that he's cutting your food stamps, that programs that are vital and important to you and the American families are being impacted in a dramatic way if this bill goes through. | ||
| We are being distracted by this, taking our eye off the ball, and we're not paying attention to what really is going to hit our pocketbook. | ||
| We want to know whether inflation is on the hole. | ||
| I'll tell you that it's not. | ||
| That you'll go to the supermarket today, you'll see that the prices are just as high as they were when he got elected. | ||
| So he hasn't done anything to cure inflation, to lower prices, to address pocketbook issues. | ||
| In fact, we're being distracted by this other debate, and we're taking our eye off the ball. | ||
| So we're in the courthouse, we're fighting legislatively and budgetarily. | ||
| And of course, the most important people, the most important piece is public sentiment. | ||
| And Abraham Lincoln said right in the middle of the Civil War, we must have public sentiment on our side. | ||
| And I think public sentiment is looking at this mess and saying, what is the president doing? | ||
| What is he doing sending military personnel to my backyard, to my local street, where my son or daughter are riding in a bicycle, where my mother or father are going to the seat, walking to the senior center. | ||
| What is he doing sending military personnel when the local police department, who we trust, told us that everything was under control? | ||
| Let's talk to Ray next in Syracuse, New York, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Ray. | ||
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unidentified
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Hey, good morning. | |
| The congressperson appears to have Trump derangement syndrome or something like it. | ||
| We people who vote for Donald Trump, which happens to be a majority American, and an overwhelming wipeout for their candidate, you guys have still not learned when you come on this TV and you act like you don't know anything about what went down multiple days and nights watched all over that city, at least in the places where they're having problems. | ||
| Those people were throwing bricks. | ||
| They were attacking people with all sorts of handheld weapons. | ||
| They did it multiple days. | ||
| They kept it up. | ||
| They defied the local police. | ||
| I watched local police do their best to not use the batons and they only did what they had to do and they were getting their rural ends kicked. | ||
| We saw it on TV multiple days. | ||
| What do you think of that, Congressman Espayat? | ||
| Well, we said from the very beginning and we continue to say vigorously that we reject violence, that we are a peace-abiding party, that the roots of our party are deeply rooted, deeply rooted in the peaceful movement for social change, and that we want things to be peaceful and we reject anyone, absolutely anyone that resorts to violence. | ||
| I may add that the last time I checked, when we voted on the reconciliation bill on the House floor, it was a one-vote difference. | ||
| So obviously the election was not that much of a landslide when you only had a one-vote margin in the House to pass this bill that will devastate America, that will probably hurt the caller at the cash register in his hometown of Syracuse, that will probably take Medicaid away from him or folks that he knows that are Medicare recipients, Medicaid and Medicare recipients, | ||
| that will hurt single moms that are taking SNAP benefits, that will hurt the grocers that depend on SNAP benefits. | ||
| So this debate that we're having today is forcing us to take our eyes off the ball. | ||
| And we know that the reconciliation bill is on life support in the Senate. | ||
| So obviously, the result were not a landslide. | ||
| It was a very tight election. | ||
| And we feel very strongly that we must protect the American people. | ||
| And we do that by guaranteeing their basic rights and privileges guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and by ensuring that programs as important as the Medicaid program, the Medicare program, your Social Security benefits, your SNAPs, the best vehicle for advancement in America is the public school system. | ||
| And he's trying to dismantle that. | ||
| So these are the programs that are important, not just to me, but I'm sure to the caller itself. | ||
| And we will continue to fight for them. | ||
| David is in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
| You're on. | ||
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unidentified
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Hello, Senator, with all due respect. | |
| I'm sorry, Representative. | ||
| How can we believe what you say about the bill when you totally misrepresented the riots in California? | ||
| We all saw that they were shooting fireworks, dropping concrete blocks on police way before Trump sent days, days before Trump sent the National Guard in. | ||
| And here you say that he inflamed it. | ||
| It was peaceful until then. | ||
| So how can we take your word for the bill that it's a bad bill when you misrepresented Trump's actions in LA so bad? | ||
| And one other quick thing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One other real quick. | ||
| This thing about arresting mothers and taking their children from them. | ||
| You know, I'm an American citizen. | ||
| I was born here. | ||
| And by God, when I was younger, I got arrested. | ||
| I had two small children at home. | ||
| I broke the law. | ||
| When you break the law, by God, you should think of your children first. | ||
| Don't break the law. | ||
| All right, Congressman. | ||
| Well, first and foremost, the case that I refer to was the case of a couple that were driving on their way to a hospital in Houston with four of their children, including a little girl with a very serious brain tumor. | ||
| They did this on a regular basis. | ||
| Their children are U.S. citizens, and they were stopped at a checkpoint and deported with four U.S. children. | ||
| The immigration mass deportation plan by Donald Trump is not just impacting the undocumented. | ||
| It's not just impacting folks that are on their way to get their green car. | ||
| It's impacting people that are here legally with their green car. | ||
| It's impacting people that have their work permits and ultimately is impacting American citizens. | ||
| If I take this suit and tie off and I put on my G's and a t-shirt and a pair of sneakers, I will be profiled. | ||
| I will be stopped. | ||
| And believe me, they won't ask me for my passport or my driver's license. | ||
| So this is a state of affairs in America right now. | ||
| And this is what got us all here. | ||
| This very aggressive attitude by our president, this very aggressive and intolerant attitude by his administration that has fueled the conflict instead of bringing the country together. | ||
| Christine is a Democrat in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. | ||
| Hi, Christine. | ||
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unidentified
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Hi, good morning. | |
| You know, everything that the Congress is saying is correct. | ||
| The people that started that mess over there in Los Angeles, those are those pop-boys that he let out of prison. | ||
| They the ones doing that. | ||
| I looked at that in Los Angeles. | ||
| Didn't see nothing that happened. | ||
| That caused no problem until he started calling them different types of military scene. | ||
| They didn't do anything. | ||
| Mayor Karen Bass is black. | ||
| Of course he's gonna give her trouble. | ||
| She's black to make her look bad, but she's not. | ||
| She control her city. | ||
| And another thing I want to say while i'm on here I want everyone to listen to this that that similar stimulus checks we got. | ||
| Trump denied them and president Biden approved them. | ||
| And when he approved them, Trump said he want his name on them because they happen in his cabinet. | ||
| So he approved it and let him put his name on there, but he denied American people a stimulus chick and y'all got to understand this. | ||
| He giving America a whole lot of bad bad, bad trouble. | ||
| Muri Christine and congressman Espayat, your response to that? | ||
| Well, I agree with the caller uh. | ||
| Two days ago we met with the secretary of HUDD and uh, he agreed that there is a a homelessness crisis in America. | ||
| He agreed that there is an affordable housing emergency in our nation, that many, many families are paying over 50 percent of their income towards rent because the rent is too high everywhere in America and yet Hudd and the president are proposing to cut the HUDD budget by 51 percent, by over half of the budget, | ||
| while we face a homelessness crisis that is frankly uh, all over the nation. | ||
| Anywhere you go, whether it's an urban city or even rural America, you will see homeless people, people that don't have a roof over their heads, and you, you know that there is an affordable housing crisis when you're paying 50 60 percent of your income towards rent, which is too high, and the minimum wage continues to be very low. | ||
| And yet HUD, which is the agency that is supposed to take care of our housing needs, proposes a 51 percent cut on his budget. | ||
| That will exacerbate the crisis and will push us off the cliff. | ||
| So yes, he is perpetrating the crisis. | ||
| Here's Jerry, a Republican in Carrollton, Ohio. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning Jerry, good morning yes sir, i'd like to ask you a question. | |
| Why is it all right for Joe Biden to let these millions of people undocument enter our country and that's legal, evidently. | ||
| I'd like to know why it's so illegal for Donald Trump to get them out of our country, and I don't think these people that come over here, that are six seven, eight months pregnant in Mexico or wherever they were, and then they have our kids, their kids, in our country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now that's American Citizens. | |
| That's not right either. | ||
| All right, let's take that up, Jerry. | ||
| Go ahead, Congressman. | ||
| What I've said time and time again is that we believe in due process. | ||
| We believe in people having the ability to go to the court system and defend themselves. | ||
| That is what this nation is built upon. | ||
| Due process, that under a court of law, everyone has the same rights and privileges. | ||
| And that's not being extended because the mass deportation machine is not making a difference between an American citizen, a green car holder that's here legally, someone that has a work permit and is allowed to work. | ||
| Farm workers are not going to the fields because they're afraid they're going to be deported. | ||
| The agricultural business industry here in America is hurting. | ||
| We hear from farmers that they're losing their crops because farm workers are not reporting to work on account of this fear, this cloud of fear that's gripping the nation. | ||
| This is how we got here. | ||
| This is how Los Angeles got here. | ||
| This is how New York got here. | ||
| It didn't come overnight. | ||
| It came as a result of a series of actions taken by this president that's unhinged. | ||
| I don't need to tell you. | ||
| You need to see him yourself. | ||
| He's unhinged. | ||
| He's out of control. | ||
| Here's Stephen in Massachusetts Independent Line. | ||
| Stephen, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| All I'd like to say today is just a small statement about keeping things simple. | ||
| I believe that President Donald Trump's overreach is the problem. | ||
| His overreach is illegal. | ||
| The governor, the mayor of Los Angeles, California, did not invite him to be there with federal troops or call out the National Guard. | ||
| And that's wrong. | ||
| And we have to keep sticking to the subject and staying in the direction of what the legal response should be to Donald Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Congressman last response. | ||
| I agree with the caller 100%. | ||
| I think that this is not just about due process. | ||
| This is not just about peaceful protests. | ||
| This is ultimately also about a bill that's going to take away your Medicaid. | ||
| It's a life and death debate. | ||
| If you don't have the benefits that you need because you have a real bad condition, health condition, you could very much find yourself on a ventilator. | ||
| You could very much find yourself in the emergency room or in the intensive care unit. | ||
| This is a debate about your health, your family's health. | ||
| This is about food security, about food stamps, about our kids' lunches, and the education system that he's trying to dismantle. | ||
| And the president also wants us to talk about that. | ||
| He wants us to concentrate our debate on the National Guard and the U.S. Marines. | ||
| All right, that is Congressman Adriano Espayat. | ||
| He is a Democrat of New York and Democratic Caucus Senior Whip and also Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair. | ||
| Congressman, thanks so much for joining us. |