Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy Homeland Security Secretary and immigration expert at the Center for Renewing America, argues U.S. asylum vetting is impossible for countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and Venezuela due to data gaps and security risks. He defends Trump’s travel ban list and border closure proposals, citing overwhelmed ICE capacity and criminal alien deportations, while dismissing racial bias claims by citing pre-pandemic economic benefits for minority workers. Cuccinelli predicts the Supreme Court may end birthright citizenship via the 14th Amendment’s "jurisdiction" clause, despite past rulings like Elk v. Wilkins. Security concerns override generosity, even for Afghan allies, as he insists no large-scale citizenship promises were made. Coordination between DHS, State, intelligence agencies, and the White House determines bans, though exceptions remain for vetted individuals. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a lot of things that Congress fights about, that they disagree on.
unidentified
We can all watch that on C-SPAN.
Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN.
That was a make-for-C-SPAN moment.
If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
And welcome aboard to everybody watching at home.
We know C-SPAN covers this live as well.
We appreciate that.
And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell.
This is being carried live by C-SPAN.
It's being watched not only in this country, but it's being watched around the world right now.
He previously served as acting deputy Homeland Security Secretary in the first Trump administration.
Currently studies immigration issues at the Center for Renewing America.
And Mr. Cuccinelli, the National Guard shooting in D.C. last month, it's put a pause on asylum decisions.
As we know, as the United States undertakes a review of the vetting process here in this country, as the Trump administration undertakes that review, what advice would you give them on what should be studied?
Well, some of this we've known for a while, so there are a lot of things that don't require a great deal of study.
And for viewers, just to give you an example, we talk about vetting people coming into the country.
That's to make sure, first and foremost, that they're not a security threat or an espionage threat.
That's a much smaller fraction of people, but also that they will, to the degree reasonable, assimilate or fit into the United States, that they'll land well, if you will, in some community.
But most people I observe in the United States assume that we can do this for anybody in the world, and we cannot.
And I'll use some examples.
We'll start with Afghanistan, given the shooting last month.
What are you going to do?
Ask the Taliban if Joe immigrant has behaved and what his background is and so forth.
And even if they answered your question, would you believe the Taliban, which is who is running Afghanistan right now?
So we, our military in particular, and a few of our intelligence agencies, the CIA in particular, do have some information on an extremely small number of people from Afghanistan, but we fundamentally cannot vet the vast majority of people from Afghanistan.
So as a matter of protecting America, that would suggest that we shouldn't let people in from Afghanistan.
And if they want to leave Afghanistan, they should go to a different country, either, for example, Pakistan or Iran, which are bordering countries.
And we can go around the world and recreate that same problem.
Syria, for example, is another place.
Venezuela in our own hemisphere and Cuba present very serious problems, but we have other ways.
We have a lot more information about people there.
We can get it from people we trust and rely on.
So these 19 countries, really 30, depending which subjects we want to talk about, that the Trump administration has identified as putting a hold on asylum from those countries.
This is really facing a problem that we've had for a long time and haven't faced up to.
And Americans aren't used to this, but there isn't really a solution for some of these problems.
You don't work through things with the Taliban about sharing information on their own people for two reasons.
One, we wouldn't believe them.
But two, any time you ask a question, I'm an attorney, I do trial work and so forth.
When you ask a question, you give away that you're interested in that particular information.
Even that sort of backhanded providing of information, we wouldn't want to do with Syria or Afghanistan or a number of other countries, Venezuela again, because that could endanger the very individuals we're asking about or their families and so forth.
So this is a real pickle.
It's not one that really can be solved.
And up to now, as a country, we have made the decision to ignore the threats posed by the inability to vet people coming in from a good number of countries around the world.
So we do have a legal process to strip people from asylum.
And it's actually simpler to do the earlier in the process you are, obviously.
The biggest hurdle in the U.S. immigration process is not asylum, it's getting a green card.
Once you get a green card, you're more or less on cruise control to citizenship unless something unusual happens.
The vetting and the effort that goes into deciding to grant a green card is very significant.
It's very high.
A lot of manpower hours at the USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which I was the acting director of before I became the acting deputy secretary at DHS.
And they're the agency that handles all of these questions and processes all these questions.
With one exception, to your question, what about monitoring people and re-vetting them?
ICE has a substantial role to play.
And one of the things ICE agents do a good bit of is the re-vetting of people, the monitoring of people who are in this country.
They have been utterly and completely overwhelmed for a long time.
They are so far outstripped.
You could multiply ICE in manpower by 10 times, and maybe they'd be able to vet and monitor people in this country, non-Americans, of course, in the manner people expect and that's been prescribed over the years under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
And that is just not happening as a simple matter of a lack of resources.
So the commitment by the Trump administration to go back, commit the resources, which is manpower primarily, to re-vetting people in this country, particularly given the massive numbers of people that the Biden administration let in with effectively no vetting, is an enormous amount of work.
It is an enormous amount of work.
But if you have a limited number of resources to do vetting with, frankly, it makes sense to stop new people coming in from those countries that are so difficult to vet and put those resources on effectively for the first time vetting people who have been let in primarily under the Biden administration.
And we're talking about enormous numbers of people, hundreds of thousands from Afghanistan and millions from around the world.
Well, you know, one thing we haven't talked about since about February is the border.
And the simple reason is, and I've been on your program, you know, in years past and predicted that Donald Trump could close the border, by which I mean more or less solve the illegal immigration problem at the border in six weeks.
And he did.
And so we've heard nothing about the border.
So whatever else, whatever other judgments people may pass on the Department of Homeland Security and its leadership, they have gotten better control of the border than at any other time in yours and my lifetimes, not counting COVID, when we literally just turned people around at the border.
But in ordinary times, I'll say they have better border control now than ever before.
Okay, so that allows you to turn your effort and resources toward the kind of vetting of people who are already here that you and I were just talking about, as well as deportation.
And I think, I don't have inside knowledge, but I suspect that what the president is most upset about is if you remember when he was campaigning, he made a variety of different statements.
He did say they were going to prioritize security threats, people who've committed other crimes.
They have done that.
The recent data release from ICE shows that two-thirds of the people they're picking up have other criminal records.
To me, as somebody who was an engineer before going to law school, I'm an efficiency nut.
That's incredibly inefficient.
The ratio shouldn't be that high.
And that sounds funny to people, but a priority which Donald Trump has followed through on making people who've committed additional crimes a priority makes absolute sense.
But there may be somewhere between 2 and 5% of the total illegal population here.
And he also set goals for himself of deporting a million people a year during his term.
And that, they are nowhere close to reaching those kinds of numbers.
They're not even close.
And even with the monetary infusion they got this summer, they have not built out the infrastructure necessary to even make a run at those kinds of deportation numbers.
Well, look, Christy Noam is focused on deterrence.
You see her on television a lot.
And DHS is a very difficult management challenge.
The comparison I make to people is the Department of War.
You know, they break things and kill people in five ways.
Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and now Space Force.
Very unified set of missions.
Lots of overlap in resources and manpower and training and so forth.
And then look at the Department of Homeland Security, which was formed after 9-11.
And let's be honest about it.
It was formed on a bipartisan basis to look busy.
The only joke I have of my old Italian pastor is, what do you do when Jesus comes back?
Look a busy.
And Republicans and Democrats alike were terrified of their voters because of the incredible failures, plural, that went into 9-11.
And so they built this whole new department and turned to their voters and said, look at us.
We've created this whole new department because we're so busy solving this problem.
And really all they did is reshuffle a lot of authority, create new communications challenges.
They divided immigration responsibility from one agency, INS, into three, ICE, CBP, and USCIS, made them less efficient, structurally less efficient.
And that was a rather random decision.
And also in the Department of Homeland Security, you have Secret Service, you have CISA, you have FEMA, you have TSA.
And yes, you can argue all of them have some role in Homeland Security, but even the name Homeland Security is misleading because really the Department of Homeland Security's jurisdiction is strongest at the border and it is the FBI who is responsible within the United States as a legal matter for Homeland Security.
So it's a very messy management arrangement.
As you probably know, I was the lead author of the Project 2025 effort to write out proposed policies with this incoming administration.
And on page one of what we wrote for DHS was to dismantle DHS because it is such a difficult management challenge.
And I say that to say this.
It is very difficult to build the kind of pipeline for deportations that Donald Trump wanted to build and wants to build.
It's not over, of course.
He's in his first year.
But it involves an awful long line of effort, resources, time.
There are timelines legally built into processes.
And all of this is done in the face of courts that all over the country try to stop and interfere with the work of the Department of Homeland Security.
So I think his fundamental frustration is that they are not deporting anywhere near the numbers of illegals here that he had intended.
They are, in fact, on track to come well below the numbers, less than half, I think, of the goals he wanted to set.
So I think that's what's driving the president's frustration.
And I don't see a lot of activity changing that would increase those numbers substantially.
Well, I've got a long line of callers who want to chat with you, as usual, when you join us on the Washington Journal.
Sal is up first in Bayou, New Jersey.
Republican, Sal, you're on with Ken Cuccinelli.
unidentified
Hello, Mr. Cuccinelli.
I would like to ask you, what do you think about Chip Roy's idea of closing the border permanently for 10 years and then sorting out all of the illegals and then opening them up after we sort them out, take them out, and then open up our borders again?
So I fundamentally agree with the concept, Sal, that we need to catch up.
My comments earlier about vetting so many of these people who came to the Biden administration really on an open borders policy.
And the president, who's obligated to follow the law, volunteered to not follow the law, President Biden.
And so now we have an enormous amount of work to do with literally millions of people who came into the country illegally.
And I do agree with Chip Roy.
I wouldn't set a particular time.
I would set out the job and get about doing it of finding and deporting the people who entered illegally and then properly vetting the people who had any legal basis to stay here.
And look, we have the highest percentage of foreign-born people in this country that we've had in a very long time.
That is not, you know, and America has been the most generous country in the world when it comes to allowing immigration.
Legal immigration, we're very, very generous.
And we have been taken advantage of.
And that has been in part a political decision, primarily by the Democrat Party or parts of it.
You know, both Presidents Obama and Biden, Biden much more so than Obama, accelerated that process.
There used to be a fairly bipartisan, I don't know, agreement on the subject of immigration right up through Bill Clinton's presidency.
There was a balanced approach by both parties.
And in the 2000s, it began to become much more political.
And it has been so much more difficult internally for us to manage the subject because it's been such a political hot potato now.
And I agree fundamentally, Sal, that we have to catch up on our vetting and the review of people who are already here.
And we need America to be able to have the time to absorb and assimilate the people who can be absorbed and assimilated.
I would just like to say, as a fellow Virginian, Ken, very disappointed in you that you would knowingly and willingly worked for such a cruel, self-serving administration.
You complain how the Finn Defend budget is causing problems with our immigration department, but yet you failed to say how Trump fired hundreds of immigration lawyers.
And this is just to keep the backlog going and keep people from having fair access to our laws.
Why don't you also tell us, Ken, how many business people have you arrested for knowingly and willingly hiring illegal immigrants?
You all want to put the onus back on the illegal immigrants, but yet we never hear about the rich white businessmen that knowingly and willingly prosper off the back of these illegals.
I don't appreciate the delivery necessarily, but I agree with your basic point.
And one of the areas that there is bipartisan agreement still in immigration is enforcement against American companies who are exploiting people illegally.
So no one watching should mistake this fact.
Yes, we're talking about people who broke the law, illegal immigrants, and so forth.
And so I believe they should be treated as people who have broken the law and they and their families should be removed from this country.
But they are still human beings.
They still deserve the treatment and dignity that every human being deserves.
We see this in our criminal justice system.
Just because you've committed a crime, and I'm going to go all the way to letting them, you know, assuming guilt, even when you've committed a crime, we treat you with basic dignity.
And that should never escape.
And I don't agree with Amanda's comment that certainly when I was there nor now does anybody want to avoid treating people with dignity.
That doesn't mean they won't be aggressive about doing their job and so forth.
But in the first Trump administration, we really only had one, one big work site enforcement effort where the company was prosecuted.
It was Mississippi Chicken Plants.
This was in the summer of 2019.
And to Amanda's point, in addition to removing the 650 or so illegal workers who were there and processing them for deportation, we also prosecuted the people in that company who the evidence demonstrated were clearly intentionally using illegal aliens.
We're exploiting them.
You know, if you're hiring an illegal knowingly, part of the reason you're doing it is because they can't complain, right?
They don't have anywhere to go.
So there is real exploitation that goes on on both sides of this.
So I agree with you, Amanda, that we should be more aggressive in prosecuting this.
And I would note for you that unlike the first Trump administration, this Trump administration has actually prioritized work site enforcement.
And they are building cases even today against companies, not just deporting the individuals involved, but against companies.
And we've seen this of all kinds of sizes, right up to, I think it was Hyundai at a construction site.
So that is a very important component.
The vast majority of people who come here illegally, break our laws, and break into our country, are coming here to work and get paid more than they can work and get paid in their home country.
I understand that.
We can all understand why somebody might do that.
But we have to control our own country.
And if we let businesses, frankly, cut their own costs and abuse the human dignity of people who are here illegally and not be prosecuted, then they're just going to keep doing it.
So I think it's very important, the change in direction under the second Trump administration to actually engage in enforcing the law against those businesses that are exploiting illegal aliens.
So, you know, Amanda, I've always believed with my fellow Virginians that I have yet to find a person I don't agree with on something on, and you and I obviously agree on this point, and I'm happy to share that agreement with you.
Here in Washington, D.C., it is Timothy, line for Republicans.
Timothy, you're on with Ken Cuccinelli.
unidentified
Hey, good morning.
You're about to the borders.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I was down in Guitmo Bay and Walnutsburg State Prison, Washington.
I was caterpillar doing the lining for the wall.
My big types of damn building.
I'm just curious if it's true that they're trying to change the direction of the Red River so the United States can claim the minimal rights.
As far as border control, Arkansas has millions of acres of all you got to do is buy a bill from that bill that's delivered and established the village.
I'm questioning the ability of our government to control the country as a whole, and we the people Timothy in Washington, D.C. I'm not sure there was an immigration question there, but Ken Cuccinelli?
Yeah, there's a much more general one, but I mean, the government is supposed to represent the people to the extent it controls the country, including the borders.
But the people are ultimately, meaning American citizens.
Let's be very specific given this discussion.
It isn't just who happens to be here, it is American citizens that are supposed to control the U.S. government, which in turn represents us in exercising its limited control of our territory.
And by limited control, I mean keeping us safe and at the borders, only allowing people in who have a right to enter.
So the conventional wisdom has grown up over the years that anybody born here is a citizen, but that's not consistent with the 14th Amendment.
That case will zero in on one part of the 14th Amendment where, and I'm paraphrasing, that people born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, that phrase is going to be the centerpiece of the case.
It's going to be what's debated.
And when you're a citizen of another country, including at your birth, when you're born of two citizens, say, of let's just take our neighbor Mexico, you're a Mexican citizen.
Frankly, when you turn 18, you're subject to the draft in Mexico.
You're not subject to the jurisdiction exclusively of the United States, and so you don't get citizenship that way.
We'll see what the Supreme Court decides, but I would point out to people who followed this that the law in the 1800s was relatively clear and in the other direction than our current conventional wisdom.
I mean, the Supreme Court decided a case in 1882 called Elk v. Wilkins, which involved American Indians, Native Americans, that were born here, obviously, in the United States, and were not U.S. citizens.
And they were absolutely legally present in the United States.
They lived here with us.
They were allowed to live here with us.
And we'll set aside the Indian War history.
But that was a legal decision.
A few years later, in Wong v. Ark, another case that you hear most about, Wong was a Chinese, he was born of Chinese parents in the United States who were here legally under what we would now call something like a green card.
So they were legal permanent residents.
And Wong left the country and came back.
He went to China to visit family and came back, and they blocked his entry and said, You're not a citizen.
That's where that's where that fight began.
And the Supreme Court said, No, he is a citizen.
And I would distinguish that case for folks because he was born of green card holders.
We would say today, even those of us who have my position on birthright citizenship, that someone born of green card holders in the United States, they're legally present, they're subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
That child is a U.S. citizen.
So there's a significant split in the two cases that exist in the Supreme Court.
They're both from the 1800s, and this hasn't been litigated in the Supreme Court since the end of the 1800s.
So over 125 years.
So we'll see what the Supreme Court does.
I think if they're true to the text of the 14th Amendment, that you will see Donald Trump's position prevail and that the anchor baby strategy of people entering the United States and pregnancy tourism, birth tourism, which is a real thing, believe it or not, it's an industry in California, will come to an end.
January 20th is when we're expecting the arguments for that case, and we'll, of course, show you those arguments here on C-SPAN.
Let you listen to them live.
This is Barbara in Bedford, Ohio, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes, my name is Barbara Mobley.
I'm a first-term caller, and I thank you for my call.
I'm calling because this whole thing is about browning of America.
I heard this years ago.
And this is why immigrants are being sent, low-paying immigrant jobs are being sent back out of America to put black people in their place for low-paying jobs, which means they cannot afford white women.
Yeah, I don't think there's an ability to convince people like Barbara that people like me that want strict immigration enforcement want it because it's our law and it's important that we control our own borders and who lives here regardless of what color they are.
And, you know, we can, this is almost like a first-grade argument.
Uh-huh, uh-uh, uh-huh.
You know, so if I'm sorry that Barbara believes that, and I imagine there are some people who make decisions based, they'll always will be, based on the color of their skin.
And those people are every color too, Barbara.
And, you know, I've experienced that in Virginia.
So we've seen that play out in all directions.
We obviously have a history with black Americans that's unique because of slavery.
And we have, you know, we fought a civil war and had a civil rights movement, two of them actually, one in the 1870s, which failed, and one in the 1960s, which succeeded.
And we've come a long way.
And that history is, you know, something that's obvious to think about whenever we talk about who are we letting in and why.
We just talked about birthright citizenship.
The 14th Amendment was passed to make sure that freed black Americans who had been slaves would have every benefit of citizenship that everybody else at that time that would be just white people had as Americans already.
And the 14th Amendment is still a foundational element of maintaining that protection.
But for people like me, the issue of immigration is about, you know, interestingly, she talked about low-paying jobs and keeping black people down, her words, not mine.
In my view, one of the biggest economic harms, and I've written on this, of large-scale immigration is that it limits opportunities for American poor people.
And American poor people are disproportionately minorities.
So make no mistake about the fact that people like me are trying to create economic opportunity for poor Americans who are disproportionately minorities.
So I'm fighting for those, what she called brown people, in America that Barbara seems to be confused about in terms of who benefits from what.
Large-scale, and I said it earlier in our conversation, large-scale, actually maybe I said it on a different show last night, large-scale illegal immigration, low-skill immigration hurts American poor people the most and the worst.
And there's evidence of this, there's plenty of evidence of this, but the most recent evidence was how the economy was doing at the end of 2019 before the pandemic hit.
It was a roaring economy, but you know who is doing the best?
Who is having the biggest percentage increases?
It was the bottom quintile in our economic structure, the bottom 20%, because not only did Trump cut taxes and regulation, critically that happened at a time when meaningful enforcement happened against or to stop unskilled, massive immigration at the low end of the economic scale.
So our poorer people had more opportunities with higher paying jobs and it was reflected in the numbers.
So the people involved would be the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State actually plays a lead role in this kind of a decision because of their regular interaction with these other countries.
Those are the two key players.
But others will have a say.
The intelligence agencies will have a little something to say, not critical, but they always pay attention to this.
And the Department of War, because they are kind of their own mini Department of State, they interact with an awful lot of countries.
But the lead two will be the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security coordinating with the White House.
And the rationale here is what I mentioned earlier, is the near impossibility of actually vetting people from many countries around the world.
And the administration will be working with the ones they can work with to establish reliable vetting processes, which will probably mean Americans alongside fill-in-the-blank country as systems get put in place so we know what's going into that system reliably.
And so we thus know what we're getting out of that system.
You know, you only get information of the quality put in out of a system.
So, and we're banking a lot.
We're relying a great deal for our own security on what comes out of those systems.
So, I expect you'll see some of that going on while there's a travel ban on.
That is not going to be a permanent ban, though there are some countries that it's hard for me to foresee how they get off of that travel ban list.
Now, that doesn't mean that particular individuals who we know a lot about won't come through actual asylum, you know, when asylum was for political prisoners coming from the Soviet Union and Cuba and so forth, as opposed to just a due process excuse to stay in the country when you've been caught here illegally.
And if, you know, hopefully this will be part of getting asylum back to what it really ought to be, and that's protecting people who can assimilate into the United States who are threatened by their own governments for various reasons.
I just wanted to thank the Trump administration first and foremost for the action that is going on right now.
unidentified
And then I have some points of view.
My point of view about this whole immigration and homeland security, first of all, this is our homeland and they are securing it.
We have the best agencies in the world for intelligence and for operations.
And they're not just plucking random Mexicans and random Chinese and random, you know, random races that don't have their green card.
They have some sort of knowledge as to, you know, as to their money situation, as to their connections in other countries.
And what I feel is happening, what I see happening from my point of view, is we are securing our country.
We're stopping the flow of illegal money and our money leaving the country to allow foreign entities to come back in.
You know, we're actually stopping domestic terrorism.
And Stanley corrected if I'm wrong, but there's things that we as the public probably should not pry into.
9-11 hasn't happened again, have it?
You know, I mean, there are so many things that lawmakers are trying to pry into and politicians, you know, and their money is actually coming from foreign entities as to my supposition, you know, to be able to curb the laws, to allow the flow of illegal money and enterprises and being funneled into our country for the purpose of whatever the purpose is.
I have to say, I find it very offensive on behalf of the agents doing this work when so many news outlets, I'm Catholic, the Catholic bishops recently put out a statement, and they started off with a phrase like, Indiscriminate enforcement.
And that is offensive and wrong.
The enforcement done by DHS is not indiscriminate.
It is not, you know, they're human beings, so mistakes are always going to be made.
That's always true.
But the fact of the matter is, we have almost one and a half million people in this country who already have removal orders.
They've all been all the way through the due process, the extensive, overly extensive, in my view, due process that people get to try to stay here when they're here illegally.
There's almost 500,000 people who've committed additional crimes in addition to coming into the country illegally.
And we just saw recent ICE data that about 150,000 of those, roughly, have been removed.
So that's about a third of the what I'll call additional crime committers that have been deported.
That is an incredible proportion under any circumstances.
That shows you that it hasn't been indiscriminate at all.
If I have a complaint, it's that that's not efficient.
We should always prioritize people who commit other crimes.
And Trump promised to do that, and his administration has done that as the numbers bear out.
But you also need to use the opportunity to get your numbers up.
It isn't just because you commit two crimes that you should be deported, but you're here illegally, that's enough.
And when a criminal alien, we'll call him, is found in his house and he lives with his family, who's also here illegally, they should all be removed.
And not to do so is wildly inefficient.
So you've put the intelligence and enforcement effort into this one person, you've come across, let's say, five, then you should remove all five.
And it's, again, it's just inefficient and slow not to do so.
And this is a one-way ratchet.
When a Joe Biden opens the borders, millions of people come in in four years.
Different estimates, but certainly about eight or ten million cross that border.
And we're not going to remove, at the pace we're going under a Trump presidency, maybe if they accelerate it, they'll remove 2 million of those people.
So you'd never even get close to removing the people Joe Biden let in.
So that's my not random enforcement point.
Her comment about domestic terrorism is correct.
We have never had another event like 9-11.
We have had small-scale domestic terrorism.
I do want to make the point, since I'm here, that domestic terrorism is not the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security.
It's the responsibility of the FBI.
Now, when things cross the international border that may have a role in terrorism in the United States, then the Homeland Security agents of ICE also have jurisdiction alongside the FBI.
So they work together, as you would expect, to identify and remove those kinds of threats.
And when the joint terrorist task forces that exist all around the country with local, state, and federal law enforcement actually move to seize and remove people, over two-thirds of the time they use immigration authorities brought by the HSI agents to do that because it is the most efficient way to protect America.
And so those are my comments on the lady's point of view, as she called it.
And happy to take other questions if we have time.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Democrat, you have a quick question.
unidentified
Not really quick, but I'd just like to ask him if he means that the American military in a declared war against Afghanistan-Taliban could vet,
I mean, could vet 15-year-old kids to be assassins and many other Afghani citizens to help them with the promise that they could be U.S. citizens or at least get asylum and on the road to citizenship in America.
That then America can say, No, I'm sorry, we can't vet you.
After they've already been vetted in a third country and vetted again by the military, vetted over and over again by the military and the CIA.
Look, a lot of those folks who primarily the role was translators worked for both sides.
And, you know, to Mary's point, you know, she said, oh, they were vetted to come work for the U.S.
I guarantee you, those U.S. soldiers kept a very close eye on those translators because, as we know, there were plenty of incidents even after vetting where folks inside the wire, as they would say, were an obvious threat to American and Allied forces.
So vetting in a country like Afghanistan is an extremely imperfect undertaking.
And I, unlike Mary, am not willing to risk American security even for our generosity.
Now, if we made the explicit promise, and I don't believe that, you know, I think people like Mary have been lied to as if we've just promised everybody in Afghanistan who worked with us, if you work with us, you can come to America and be an American citizen.
That did not happen.
That did not happen in large scale.
So, you know, don't think we're breaking promises with an awful lot of these folks.
And again, a lot of them also worked for the Taliban at various times.
So, you know, if you want them living next door to you and you're willing to risk it, you know, I'd be really curious, Mary.
But I'm not willing to risk it for my family and my community.
And I don't think you and many other people would if we personalized it like that and made you own the consequences of that security decision.
So I think we come down in different places on that, but that's why we have a constitutional republic and we get to debate these things.
The U.S. House will return at 2 p.m. Eastern today for legislative business.
Today, members are considering more than two dozen bills related to natural resources, including legislation that would authorize the National Mall as a location for the World War II Women's Memorial, also a bill aiming to reauthorize federal funding for rural schools.
Later this week, the House is expected to consider the 2026 Defense Programs and Policy Bill, also known as the NDAA.
When members return, be sure to follow our live coverage of the U.S. House here on C-SPAN.
Coming up later today, President Trump travels to Pennsylvania to speak about the economy.
The Hill points out that he'll be giving remarks in Monroe County, which he carried by just one point a year ago in the 2024 presidential election, contributing to his overall victory in the state against former Vice President Kamala Harris.
We'll have live coverage of the president on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-span.org.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday with our guest best-selling author, Arthur Brooks, who has written 13 books about finding purpose, connection, and cultivating lasting joy.