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democracy It isn't just an idea. | |
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us to discuss immigration is Ken Cuccinelli. | ||
| He is Immigration and Homeland Security Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America, formerly acting deputy homeland security secretary in the first Trump administration. | ||
| Welcome to the program. | ||
| Good to be with you, as always. | ||
| It's been a little while. | ||
| Remind us about the Center for Renewing America, your mission and funding. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the Center for Renewing America is a think tank, and we think of ourselves as a dew tank. | ||
| But what that means is we develop policy solutions in a limited number of areas. | ||
| I am a senior fellow for Homeland Security and Immigration. | ||
| That is one of the areas we work in. | ||
| Another is the federal budget. | ||
| We also fight the transgender agenda, and there's a series of other things. | ||
| We also touch on foreign policy, pushing policies that support the American side of trying to get our allies in NATO, for example, to commit more to their own defense and so on. | ||
| So we don't cover every issue like, say, something like the Heritage Foundation might because it's so much bigger. | ||
| But we have taken a tack of being aggressive in the issue areas that we engage in. | ||
| For example, in my own space, we have laid down the backdrop for governors on the border of the United States to repel illegal aliens crossing their borders from outside of the United States without federal permission or approval based on Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which allows them to do that. | ||
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And I know of no that addresses that. | |
| Just because there's a lot to get to, and you wanted just to mention your funding. | ||
| Well, as I mentioned, we're pretty small, so our budget is a few million dollars a year, and that's it. | ||
| So we operate out of one little office in D.C. and people like me work remotely. | ||
| And that comes from where? | ||
| And private donations from individual donors, yes, private donations, no government funds. | ||
| In fact, one of the budget pushes we make is to stop government from giving any NGOs funds to undertake their mission sets because they're overwhelmingly left-wing, as we've now seen with Doge uncovering that from the Biden administration. | ||
| And we're perfectly happy to continue to live without any government money as we think is appropriate. | ||
| And let's talk about immigration hours. | ||
| The Trump administration's hit the six-month mark. | ||
| What do you think have been the most important immigration changes made by the Trump administration these six months? | ||
| So the first and starkest is the securing of the border with no change in legislation or budget. | ||
| This was a debate before President Trump was sworn in again for his second term. | ||
| You'll recall there were Republicans in the Senate even who said we need legislation because Joe Biden said, oh, I can't secure the border without new laws. | ||
| And that was argued by people like me to be untrue, that the executive branch already had all the authority it needs. | ||
| And Donald Trump has proven by shutting the border down to its lowest level of illegal crossings in history. | ||
| Last month there were around 6,000, that's about 200 a day, the lowest level ever recorded, and none of those were released into the interior. | ||
| Every single encountered illegal alien crossing the border has been detained. | ||
| That was true in May as well. | ||
| That is a huge and major accomplishment. | ||
| It, first of all, puts the debate that was going on for two years before his swearing in to rest, that additional authorities were needed. | ||
| That was clearly not the case. | ||
| And that has always been from both parties: step one, secure the border before we can talk about fill-in-the-blank, guest workers, reforming legal immigration, et cetera. | ||
| Step two are their efforts to expand deportation of the really unknown number of illegal aliens in the United States. | ||
| Estimates range everywhere from 10 to 30 million. | ||
| And they have been very aggressive about that, putting a special emphasis on people who are in this country illegally, but who have also committed crimes illegally. | ||
| Well, crimes illegally, of course. | ||
| Things like sexual assault, rape, robbery, DUIs, etc. | ||
| And I want to say that I would point out, because I'm sure we'll have discussion about it, that the additional criminal population among illegal aliens is probably somewhere between 2.5% to 5% of the overall population. | ||
| So I'm sure we're going to take some calls where people are going to say, oh, he promised to get rid of the criminals and nobody else. | ||
| And that is just not true. | ||
| But the numbers of the people they have deported are about 30% criminal illegal aliens, which makes them about 10 times the proportion of the deportees as their number in the illegal alien population in the United States. | ||
| So they have strongly emphasized getting people out of the country who provide public safety in addition to enforcing immigration law. | ||
| So I do want to ask you about deportation, specifically about the public opinion about it. | ||
| This is a CBS News poll that was released on Sunday. | ||
| And the question is: the Trump administration is trying to deport. | ||
| 52% said more people than you expected. | ||
| 37% said what you expected, and 11% said fewer. | ||
| Another question is: who is the Trump administration prioritizing for deportation? | ||
| And it's comparing numbers between June and now. | ||
| So in one month, the number went from 53% to 44% for dangerous criminals as to who you think the Trump administration is prioritizing. | ||
| People who aren't dangerous criminals, that number went up from 47% to 56% as far as what people think the administration is prioritizing. | ||
| So I just want to ask you about that and the prioritizing of criminals and what people were expecting out of the you said that the president during the campaign never said that he would prioritize dangerous criminals? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| That he would only be going after dangerous criminals. | ||
| He has always said that he will prioritize them, and they have done that. | ||
| As I noted, criminals are being deported at a rate over 10 times everyone else in the illegal alien population. | ||
| So that priority was advertised by the president. | ||
| My point was that he didn't say that's all we're going to do. | ||
| And that priority has been followed through on very aggressively by the Trump administration. | ||
| But in terms of simple numbers, the number of illegal aliens here who haven't been convicted of an additional crime other than illegally breaking into the country is maybe 95 to 97 percent of the population. | ||
| The president also said during the campaign, and I will grant, he said a variety of different things. | ||
| He said he's going to remove all, he's going to remove lots, he's going to remove more than any president before him, and that record is about 3 million from President Obama's term. | ||
| President Obama actually removed more illegal aliens than any other president. | ||
| And they are behind schedule, the Trump administration is, if they're going to even match President Obama's numbers. | ||
| And that would be combining Trump's first term and second term. | ||
| And I want to ask you. | ||
| All of the news and focus, the numbers are not that high. | ||
| I want to ask you about, you know, Trump administration officials have said that there's no amnesty while carrying out mass deportations. | ||
| However, the news site Notice has been reporting that there are Republican lawmakers that have been advocating for immigrants in their districts to stay. | ||
| The headline says, Republicans calling for more deportations are quietly advocating for immigrants in their district. | ||
| Despite Trump's immigration agenda, some lawmakers have helped immigrants as part of their constituent casework. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Should there be exceptions to the deportation strategy? | ||
| You know, that's a great question. | ||
| So I was testifying in front of Congress last week on the issue of parole. | ||
| And for the people listening to us, parole in the immigration context is not like parole from jail. | ||
| Parole in the immigration context means a special exception. | ||
| The law says it's supposed to be case by case to allow someone into the country or to stay in the country who would not otherwise qualify. | ||
| And Congressman Correa used an example of an illegal alien who's lived here a long time and his three sons are in the United States Marine Corps. | ||
| And I granted to the congressman, I said, look, that kind of situation may be exactly what parole is for. | ||
| The reason for the hearing was that the Biden administration let in about two and a half to three million people using parole and they turned it into its own immigration program. | ||
| So it wasn't case by case. | ||
| So to your question, I think there are individual cases where the Secretary of Homeland Security could and should grant parole for a variety of reasons. | ||
| We typically think of those as humanitarian reasons. | ||
| Somebody needs medical care or something of that nature. | ||
| And those grants are with conditions. | ||
| They're not typically permanent. | ||
| So that has a role to play here, but parole was so badly abused in the Biden administration and similarly, though not the same way in the Obama administration, that my suggestion to Congress was to limit that to a hard number every year of, say, 3,000 opportunities to grant parole. | ||
| And so the good cases that we can hear about in neighborhoods and congressional districts and coming across our border, that really call for the use of the application of mercy on an individual basis, on a specially warranted case, can be done and the American people can be confident that that power won't be abused, as it was in the Biden administration, | ||
| to literally allow two and a half to three million people to just invade the United States. | ||
| And Mr. Cuccinelli. | ||
| You did mention immigration enforcement numbers. | ||
| I wanted to show this Reuters article from July 2nd comparing previous administrations to this one. | ||
| This tracks daily ICE arrests. | ||
| It says that that more than doubles under President Trump. | ||
| This is the average daily arrests by ICE. | ||
| And what it's shown here is that it is over double the daily average from previous administrations. | ||
| I want to make sure that people know that they can call us and ask questions to our guest, Ken Cuccinelli. | ||
| And I don't have, Mimi, I don't have the Reuters article. | ||
| Is that compared to the Biden administration or any and all administrations? | ||
| Yep, so that's it compares it to Biden, to the first Trump, and then to the latter two years of the Obama administration. | ||
| Again, that's average daily arrests. | ||
| And our phone numbers are, sorry, sir. | ||
| I'm just going to let people know the phone numbers, then I'll let you respond. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Our guests will be with us for about half an hour and can take your questions. | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
| You wanted to say something. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say that if this administration is going to reach the goals that they have laid out publicly for deportations, two times that timeframe isn't going to cut it. | ||
| They're going to have to raise the deportation level very, very substantially if they're going to meet the publicized goals that the president campaigned on in terms of deportations. | ||
| You mean the 1 million per year? | ||
| Is that the number you're referring to, 1 million per year? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So 1 million per year would require about 1,500 arrests per day. | ||
| Well, let me do my math. | ||
| No, more like 3,000 arrests per day. | ||
| And we say arrests, but remember that one and a half, not quite one and a half million, but 1.4 million people already have removal orders. | ||
| They've been all the way through the due process. | ||
| There's about 400 to 500,000, probably now down to around 400,000, criminal illegal aliens who've committed other crimes after entering the country. | ||
| That's 1.8 million people that they have to work on without putting anybody else in the pipeline. | ||
| But they have not built up the systems to find those people and to move them into deportation processes quickly. | ||
| The other thing that they should be doing that wasn't done, for example, in the Biden administration is when they go to a site where they're picking up someone, say, who has a removal order, they ought to be looking around, for example, at that person's family members, because if they entered illegally, the odds are very high that everyone else that that person is living with also entered illegally, we know from experience. | ||
| And the Biden administration would pointedly not do that. | ||
| And as a simple matter of efficiency, that is the most cost-effective way to operate. | ||
| And that doesn't mean those people would be removed, but they would be put into the process where their deportation proceedings would be advanced and decisions would be finally made. | ||
| And for those who are here illegally, then they would be put in the pipeline for removal as well. | ||
| And ICE is not building up the logistics to handle these kinds of numbers. | ||
| And part of that logistics is facilities. | ||
| The president, according to Bloomberg, has just awarded $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility, the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S. What are your thoughts on how those detainees should be treated? | ||
| You mentioned the application of mercy. | ||
| Do those that are detained, what are the guidelines for how they are treated? | ||
| So first of all, there should be one set of federal guidelines, and let's start with the basics. | ||
| People have entered this country illegally. | ||
| They've broken our laws, but they're still human beings and they deserve to be treated with the dignity that every human being deserves to be treated with. | ||
| So let's not objectify these people. | ||
| They are people. | ||
| Sometimes there's families and so forth. | ||
| But they have broken the law and that's not a reason not to enforce the law. | ||
| But you do go about it in one, while trying to gain efficiencies so there's movement of mass numbers of people if you can. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you're abusing anyone. | ||
| Having said that, because detention should be short, I've always advocated for large-scale facilities that are temporary holding facilities, and that is some of what has been contracted for. | ||
| Frankly, Mimi, those contracts should have already been in place and they should have just been contingent on the money that was voted on this month coming through. | ||
| You know, they lost a month going that route and those companies lost planning time and so forth. | ||
| So there's still three and a half more years in President Trump's term. | ||
| But these are steps, management and logistical steps that should have been taken prior to this month and have been ready to deploy. | ||
| And it's not clear that that was going on at DHS. | ||
| So I think there's still room for them to up their efficiency. | ||
| And certainly there's a lot of room for them to expand their numbers. | ||
| And I think a lot of the polling, if I could just make one last comment. | ||
| I think a lot of the polling is response, of course, to the appearance people are seeing. | ||
| The news plays a significant role in how people's opinions change. | ||
| But the numbers actually aren't that high yet. | ||
| They may be twice priors, but they're nowhere near what President Trump has committed to doing. | ||
| NBC News, I want to ask you about Alligator Alcatraz, so-called in Florida in the Everglades. | ||
| The detainees are talking about inhumane conditions there. | ||
| I wonder if you've had a chance to take a look at that facility. | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| Only the pictures in news. | ||
| We did not use that when I was at DHS. | ||
| Frankly, we weren't building up to do large-scale deportation when I was at DHS. | ||
| That was one of my disappointments there. | ||
| So I'm glad to see the president doing it now. | ||
| Any comment on the pictures that you've seen of the conditions there and what your impressions are? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, it's kind of funnish to talk about something like Alligator Alcatraz, but it's just a facility. | ||
| I will say in its favor, it has a nearby airstrip, so you can deal with transportation more easily than you can at some other facilities. | ||
| Look, Florida has used this for emergency response for regular Floridians. | ||
| I have no concerns about whether it's humanitarian or not. | ||
| It clearly is. | ||
| The real question is: is it an appropriate and efficiently usable facility? | ||
| I appreciate Governor DeSantis trying to pitch in from the state level, and in that sense, it may be very helpful. | ||
| But if it takes, you know, half a day for ICE agents working in the area who pick up deportees to get them to alligator, so-called alligator Alcatraz, and then to get back out on the street to do more work, then that's not an efficient use of time and resources. | ||
| And it's fairly far outside of Miami, which is the largest locality nearby. | ||
| So unless they're going to be using that airstrip very effectively, I'm a little concerned whether this would be cost-effective or not. | ||
| My former colleague Mark Morgan, former head of the CBP during the first Trump administration, has written on this. | ||
| He has expressed similar concerns. | ||
| And you keep hearing me use the word efficiency. | ||
| I will say I was an engineer before I went to the dark side, went to law school. | ||
| And efficiency is something I still pay attention to and care about. | ||
| And it's very important in a system, in a situation where the president has set very lofty numerical goals. | ||
| Those don't just happen because of political will. | ||
| They take substantial management expertise and a lot of logistics being brought to bear to succeed in achieving goals like that. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Owaso, Oklahoma. | ||
| Kirk, good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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President, good morning. | |
| How are you guys? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Go right ahead, Kirk. | ||
| Good morning, Kirk. | ||
| Good. | ||
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Yeah, Mr. Cochinelli, as a farmer, deportee, you know, have vast knowledge of the whole system. | |
| My question to you is when, one of them, how do you think about the Trump administration firing a lot of judges? | ||
| And I know you talk about the numbers, and that's why some of the reasons he's not getting this number, and you will never get these numbers, because you're supposed to know that in the system, all these arrests, majority have to going to require to see a judge because people might have relief, might can have avenues to stay in the country. | ||
| They might marry two American citizens, but didn't file their paperwork. | ||
| Some of them were just overstaying. | ||
| So they have a lot of relief. | ||
| So My thing is he's trapping himself by talking all these, oh, we're going to deport, but they're not telling the American people that there's a process. | ||
| And that's why this number is never going to be what it is. | ||
| All right, Kirk, let's get a response. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that, I would suggest, look, we talk about due process all the time. | ||
| And the Supreme Court has said that people who are here illegally are due the due process Congress has given them. | ||
| So it's not the same as someone charged with a crime who's a U.S. citizen in the United States. | ||
| It's not the same as that. | ||
| And there are different levels of amounts of due process or amounts of process. | ||
| Kirk mentioned judges, and he was referring there to administrative law judges who judge immigration cases. | ||
| And this is one of those areas that is one of the more difficult ones for the Trump administration to ramp up personnel. | ||
| This is in the Department of Justice, not the Department of Homeland Security, though it would work better if they were both in one department. | ||
| Nonetheless, there are 20 plus thousand retired or no longer serving state judges who would have to do nothing more than learn Title VIII, which is the part of the U.S. Code that deals with immigration, which is, for a lawyer and a former judge, easy to do. | ||
| And they don't have to move anywhere. | ||
| These are people I think that the Department of Justice should be targeting for hiring so that they can massively increase the number of judges. | ||
| And let's, you know, we're talking a lot about illegal immigration, but one of the things that should upset people about people cheating, people coming across the border illegal. | ||
| Kirk mentioned people overstaying their visas, also illegal, and that's not a basis to stay, that's a basis to be deported. | ||
| All of these people who are cheating, they clog the system for the people who are playing by the rules. | ||
| And before I was the deputy secretary at DHS, I ran USCIS, which is our legal immigration agency, as I refer to it. | ||
| Everybody's familiar with IEC and CBP, but there's a third immigration agency, USCIS, for example, that handles processing new citizenship applications. | ||
| And I was very proud to swear in new American citizens by the hundreds and thousands in my role leading USCIS. | ||
| And any natural-born American ought to go to one of these ceremonies. | ||
| They're very moving. | ||
| It's the biggest day in the lives of these individuals, one of the biggest days in their lives. | ||
| They're so proud to have played by the rules and to have crossed the finish line. | ||
| And these are some of the people who, frankly, are often the most upset as they watch cheaters get jumped up the line. | ||
| And that's not fair. | ||
| And these same immigration judges have to deal with a lot of the contentious issues in the paths and the personnel that deal with it that USCIS handles while trying to process all the people who are playing by the rules. | ||
| So I do think, Kirk, they need to hire a lot more judges. | ||
| And there hasn't been emphasis on that because there is a lot of process for some of the folks who are picked up for deportation, who ultimately are going to lose their case, as the vast majority are, overwhelming majority, who have come here illegally. | ||
| And I just want to show you. | ||
| But there's a process to do that. | ||
| And I just want to show what Kirk was talking about. | ||
| This is from PBS News with the headline as Immigration Courts Face Backlog, DOJ Cuts Dozens of Judges. | ||
| Ann is calling us from Tennessee, Republican line. | ||
| Go ahead, Ann. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| First, I want to say good morning to my good friend Carol. | ||
| Mr. Cuccinelli, when President Trump was in office the first time, he had DNA testing done on the children. | ||
| The last segment, the Democrats called in, they're all concerned about the children. | ||
| Well, that slowed down the Biden's plan to get them all in here. | ||
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unidentified
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So they stopped that and brought in hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children, promptly lost 320,000. | |
| They don't know where they are. | ||
| Some of the children had phones. | ||
| And there was a congressional hearing this week that said that these children called in that were being abused, 65,000 calls on these children were ignored. | ||
| So the Democrats that keep calling in, it's always about the children. | ||
| President Trump is having to deal with these Saurus gangs that are opposing our police and our border patrol. | ||
| Obama didn't have to deal with that because Soros supported whatever Obama did. | ||
| So the Democrats that called, and we'll talk about the children. | ||
| Okay, let's talk about that. | ||
| And go ahead, Ken Cuccinelli. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So we did start in some parts of the border crossings. | ||
| We did start doing DNA testing, and it was extremely effective, as you might imagine, in identifying fake families. | ||
| Fake families are adults using children to try to get across the border and to be treated differently from a legal standpoint. | ||
| Families can only be held for about 20 days because of something called the Flores settlement, really imposed by one left-wing judge in California on the whole country 30 years ago, almost 30 years ago, and refined under the Obama administration. | ||
| You are also correct that the Biden administration stopped checking DNA and recording DNA, which, by the way, is obviously identification of people coming across an international boundary who don't want to be caught is obviously a real challenge. | ||
| So biometrics, DNA, are very valuable in being accurate with the information that the United States government is working with with these folks. | ||
| It's also literally the best tool in sussing out fake families where children are being trafficked or used to get adults across the border illegally. | ||
| Ann is also correct that in their rush to bring millions of people in their open borders policy in the Biden administration, they lost over 300,000 children. | ||
| They had no idea where they were. | ||
| Those children have not yet been found. | ||
| The Trump administration has said it's a high priority for them to find those children. | ||
| And in the congressional hearing Ann referred to this week, officials admitted that over 65,000 of those children made calls to a hotline set up to report abuse by the sponsor households they were placed with. | ||
| And 65 plus thousand of those calls were never returned. | ||
| So these children were put at risk by the Biden administration and nothing was ever done about it. | ||
| And Mr. Cuccinelli, during your time during the first Trump administration, were all children DNA tested? | ||
| And if when you say that they were found to be fake families or they didn't belong to Those adults, what happened to those children? | ||
| So, not all children were tested. | ||
| We didn't build up the capacity to do that. | ||
| That is a capacity that should be built up. | ||
| When people ask what should be done next at the border, that's one of the things that should be done, and we should come up with technological solutions that can work out in the field for agents who don't, without bringing people back to, say, a border patrol facility. | ||
| So, that's one of the longer-term goals for the department. | ||
| It is very important to be utilizing that technology. | ||
| You also, by the way, spot repeat enters, which is a separate felony in the United States. | ||
| So, that does need to be done. | ||
| When those families were, or fake families, were spotted, the adults were separated out for prosecution frequently for trafficking. | ||
| And the children were separated, they were interviewed, and as you might imagine, much closer attention was paid from an investigatory standpoint about whether they were being exploited. | ||
| Or, you know, the fact is that parents send their children on these journeys as unaccompanied children, as dangerous and neglectful as that is from a parent standpoint. | ||
| So, there are some that are more innocuous than others. | ||
| And obviously, we were looking for the more serious situations where children might have been being exploited and to gather evidence of that exploitation and then to prosecute the adults. | ||
| And then the children were then treated as unaccompanied minors and they were dealt with on an individual basis. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say to remind us of what happened with individual minors during the first Trump administration: were they placed in foster care? | ||
| Were they non-rental organizations care for them? | ||
| What happens under the law, and this is an unfortunate part of the law, is HHS Health and Human Services, not the Department of Homeland Security, takes over responsibility for those children. | ||
| And that is very unfortunate because whenever you involve two departments instead of one, you add much higher levels of disorganization and it slows things down. | ||
| But they would place these children with what amounted to foster homes. | ||
| If they could find family members, they'd be placed with family members. | ||
| And that was very controversial, I would add. | ||
| And the reason that they weren't just returned immediately to their home countries was because statutory law in the United States, frankly, has been screwed up with what's a law referred to as the TVPRA from almost 20 years ago now that says you can return children immediately from Mexico and Canada if they're Mexican or Canadian. | ||
| And what that ended up doing is creating a loophole where you couldn't return children from other countries. | ||
| And this is why parents will often from other than Mexico or Canada, and we don't have a lot of illegal Canadians entering, but will send their children separately because the law has been read to exclude immediate return of children to all other countries in the world. | ||
| And that has been recognized on a bipartisan basis as a major flaw in our immigration law. | ||
| And yet, because of all the fighting in Congress, they have never been able to fix it. | ||
| All right, let's talk to you. | ||
| And so the children pile up here. | ||
| Let's talk to Jason Williston Park, New York, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Mr. Cuccinelli, thank you for your time. | ||
| A couple of things. | ||
| First, I think in order to make the numbers, you know, you talk about efficiency, and that's a little bit chilling in an OLEAN way as it is. | ||
| But in order to make the numbers, they're going to have to start doing sweeps and kind of put aside the warrants. | ||
| And I think we saw that in that little park escapade that they did in LA where everybody left because they got a warning. | ||
| But I just kind of want to pose something. | ||
| My family comes from WASPs in Boston. | ||
| I'm in New York now. | ||
| But your name ends in a vowel. | ||
| And I just kind of want to pose a question for you. | ||
| Back in the day when we had everybody coming in from Italy, which I'm sure your family is from, from your name, and you talk about efficiency and budgeting and things like that for the government, when La Costa Nostra was making their debut in the United States and costing the FBI and the government so much money, we could have posed back then that maybe just rounding up all the Italians and sending them back to Italy because it was costing so much money. | ||
| And I feel that that's what's going on right now a little bit with our kind of vilifying everybody that has a name that sounds like they come from south of the border. | ||
| And for that 2.5% to 3.5%, even the ones that are going to court and then are getting caught up on the, you know, when they come out of court, and they're just sweeping them up and taking them. | ||
| So I just kind of wanted to pose that question for you. | ||
| Why are we now doing that? | ||
| Let's get a response, Jason. | ||
| So the law, I am half Italian. | ||
| I'm also half Irish. | ||
| And that's my family history. | ||
| They came over on a boat. | ||
| And a fact that a lot of people don't know was the law then and is the law now, that the captain of the vessel that brings you over, whether that's a plane or a boat, if you are not allowed to legally enter the United States, that captain is responsible to take you back to where they picked you up. | ||
| And think about what that does. | ||
| That meant at the time when my family came over, the ship captain made doggone sure before anybody got on that boat that they could legally enter the United States because there was no way he wanted to absorb the cost nor that his company wanted to absorb the cost of taking those people back. | ||
| We do not get the benefit of that screening mechanism when people simply invade the country by walking across our borders because there is no vessel captain. | ||
| We don't have that intermediary filter or opportunity. | ||
| And because transportation's gotten so easy and Mexico lets so many people in and through Mexico to get to our border, we've lost that screen. | ||
| Jason is wrong about the sweeps. | ||
| The law is the law. | ||
| And the greatest impediment to the law being implemented, even as it's written, even as difficult as all the due process I've referenced is for the government to manage, are judges who invade Invade that process and throw roadblocks in, enter injunctions and so forth. | ||
| That got harder to do with the Casa v. Trump ruling at the end of the Supreme Court term. | ||
| But your presumption that illegal tactics have to be used is just wrong. | ||
| That's why I mentioned that I think one of DHS's shortcomings thus far has been preparing the manpower to pick up the kind of numbers. | ||
| And I'm not talking about pick up off the street. | ||
| I'm talking about do the research to know that you're targeting someone who has a removal order already and you have a plan in place to remove that person back to their home country at the time you go pick them up because they've been all the way through due process. | ||
| And as I noted, we have 1.4 million of those. | ||
| The reason they should be tripling and quadrupling the number of judges by hiring former state judges, for example, my one suggestion from earlier that we were talking about, is so they can put more people in that particular part of the pipeline. | ||
| There is a process to go through, but people do have to be identified, picked up, and put in that process. | ||
| And it will shock no one to know that many people here illegally do not keep the U.S. government up to date on where they are living and working. | ||
| And so that's a very important set of tasks, all that have to go on in parallel. | ||
| So Jason's negative assumption about my comments about the necessary necessity for efficiency, he wants to assume that I'm talking about ignoring the law. | ||
| And that's just not true, Mimi. | ||
| And it's not necessary to ignore the law to succeed. | ||
| Mr. Cuccinelli, I want to ask you about what's on the front page of today's Washington Post. | ||
| You might not have seen it, but the headline is: 180,000 migrants could have trackers. | ||
| This is an ankle monitor. | ||
| It says that ankle monitor use will vastly expand. | ||
| Any reaction to that? | ||
| So ankle monitors are part of what's referred to, the acronym you'll see as ATD, Alternatives to Detention. | ||
| And this concept came from what local jails do in your own community is using ankle monitors so people can live at home instead of being held in a detention facility. | ||
| So when it works, it's great for both sides. | ||
| The individuals are living in their home, they're more comfortable, but they're also restricted in their movement because they're essentially home detention. | ||
| And the point is to keep track of them while a detention process is going on in the process of removal. | ||
| So it's useful where it works, but because people can break those off their ankles, it requires the cooperation of the individual. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| And historically, that has not happened at a high rate with illegal aliens. | ||
| Andy in Phoenix, Arizona, Republican, you're on with Ken Cuccinelli. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Mimi. | |
| Good morning, Ken. | ||
| Ken, thanks for your knowledge and expertise on this. | ||
| It's really appreciated. | ||
| Mimi, I have a couple of comments and then a question for Ken. | ||
| Just real quick, you read that Washington Post article on the ankle monitors. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, not Joshlyn Nungari's murderers, the two illegals who entered under Biden, cut off their ankle monitors and then went on to commit that crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I don't know how I feel about that. | |
| My couple comments are, so when Biden came into office, his administration reversed all the good measures put in place by Donald Trump, and most of the media ignored the daily tens of thousands of people coming to the border, the caravans coming to the border and just let into our country unvetted. | ||
| For me, the border has always been my number one issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's really, I thought it was criminal, to be quite honest. | |
| People say in this country, well, Americans commit more crime than illegals. | ||
| Well, there's a lot more Americans, but are you saying that we should allow additional criminals into this country, non-citizens committing crime? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Mimi, you had a guest one time, Steph Kite from Axie Olson, and I asked, did the DOJ ever do an assessment on how many additional criminals we are importing into our country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And her answer was, well, there could be a little more uptick on farm workers. | |
| Most of these people aren't farm workers. | ||
| Okay, we don't need 20 million farm workers. | ||
| So, any comment, Ken? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So, first, Andy drives home the point. | ||
| Ankle monitors don't maintain public safety. | ||
| They'll only work for tracking cooperative illegal aliens. | ||
| And while when people are confronted and detained, they will sometimes begin to cooperate. | ||
| The level of the proportion of cooperation relative to, say, the use of ankle monitors for home detention in the criminal context in the United States is very, very low. | ||
| So people should keep that in mind. | ||
| With respect to crime rates, I hear about this quite a bit, and it's hard to pin down the crime rates of illegal aliens because many jurisdictions intentionally don't track whether the criminals they're picking up are U.S. citizens or here legally or not here legally. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that crime rates are not appropriate to look at. | ||
| What matters is the raw number of crimes committed by people who should have never been here in the first place, because every one of those crimes, including the ones referenced by Andy, are 100% preventable by enforcing border security and not letting them in illegally in the first place. | ||
| And so I'll leave it at that. | ||
| Okay, one more call. | ||
| Congress has held hearings on this subject that I've participated in. | ||
| And, you know, people who want more illegal immigration, which sounds funny, but Joe Biden did, they talk about crime rates. | ||
| People who want to keep America safe and want less illegal immigration talk about the fact that every one of those crimes is preventable. | ||
| So, you know, one more call for you from the United States. | ||
| Some of the discussion is dictated by. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| In Chicago, Illinois, line for Democrats. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Mr. Vicinelli. | |
| You just stated the law is the law. | ||
| You're an attorney. | ||
| What do you think should happen to employers that employ undocumented immigrants? | ||
| For example, Donald Trump, who has employed undocumented immigrants for decades and decades and decades. | ||
| What should happen to employers like that? | ||
| So one of the things I found surprising when I was at DHS was we really only had one large-scale work site enforcement. | ||
| Some of you may remember it. | ||
| It happened in 2019, and it was raiding a set of chicken plants, chicken processing plants, all owned by the same company. | ||
| And prosecutions took place of managers because DOJ accumulated the evidence that People in the company knew they were hiring illegal aliens. | ||
| By the way, those job positions, you talk about jobs Americans won't do. | ||
| Chicken processing probably is high on that list. | ||
| Americans flooded in to fill out job applications and were ecstatic to get those jobs. | ||
| So there are no jobs Americans won't do. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I believe employers should be prosecuted as part of work site enforcement. | ||
| And my surprise at this event was that that was a bipartisanly supported position. | ||
| I think many Democrats understand that the individuals in these circumstances, yes, they're displacing American workers. | ||
| That upsets me. | ||
| They're also exploiting the illegal aliens. | ||
| They've got them in a position where, you know, what illegal alien employee is going to complain about something at work. | ||
| And employers take advantage of that. | ||
| And so I do believe they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. | ||
| It's one of the best ways to drive down illegal immigration in a way that doesn't require direct efforts at the entire illegal immigration population. | ||
| Most people come here to work. | ||
| And if those opportunities are taken away, two things are going to happen. | ||
| Less people will come, so our illegal immigration problem will shrink. | ||
| And poor Americans will get richer. | ||
| And there's proof of that. | ||
| We saw that in 2019. | ||
| If you go back and look at the economic data in 2019, as illegal immigration enforcement had ramped up, the part of the economy that did the best, that saw the biggest wage increases, was the poorest part of the American economy, meaning poor U.S. citizens saw wage growth they hadn't seen in decades. | ||
| And a big part of that was the law of supply and demand. | ||
| As we cut off the incoming flow of illegals, poor Americans had better job prospects. | ||
| And those people who support open borders always remember that they are supported, they're willing to sacrifice American poor people and their work opportunities and their wage growth opportunities, which, you know, we count on that kind of growth here as a country to give people the chance to improve themselves. | ||
| And yes, we're a nation of immigrants, but first and foremost, we have to take care of our own poor people. | ||
| And illegal immigration undercuts that. | ||
| Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy homeland security secretary under the first Trump administration and Immigration and Homeland Security Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America. | ||
| You can find out more about them at americarenewing.com. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thanks, Mimi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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