On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Briefing,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) said that there’s “grievance” from the Trump administration in their talk about the negative impacts of what they term “mass illegal immigration.”
Host Jen Psaki played video of White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller saying, “What has it done to our schools? What has it done to our hospitals? What has it done to just traffic in our cities? Every issue that affects our quality of life, Jesse, public safety, drugs, crime, education, health care, waiting in the emergency room are all exacerbated, worsened, and undermined by mass illegal immigration.”
She then asked, “He’s sort of saying a version of the evil quiet part out loud there in terms of what he wants to do. What concerns do you have about what they could do with this money?”
Padilla responded, “Yeah, and first of all, talk about grievance, right? And it’s part of the cruelty of the bill. For all the focus there was, rightfully so, on the cuts to health care, cuts to the social safety net, all the cuts, cuts, cuts in the federal budget, nutrition assistance programs to fund tax breaks for billionaires, right? Overlooked in all of that was the one area of the federal budget that saw significant increases, ICE, not just immigration, detentions, enforcement, deportations, but the scaling up of ICE to be the largest federal law enforcement agency in the land, in short order, without a change in policy. So all this cruelty that you’re seeing, it’s not just going to be scaled up. When people ask me, what does the budget mean for immigration enforcement? It’s more of the same, if not actually worse.”
Padilla added that he wants to “truly target the enforcement actions at the dangerous, violent criminals.”
