[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 33 (Thursday, February 26, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H1167-H1168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    PRESIDENT SPEAKS ON IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, I am very proud of the President for 
speaking directly to the American people on immigration last night in a 
town hall on Telemundo and on MSNBC. He was very clear that he will 
comply with the dictates of the judicial branch, even as he fights a 
Federal judge's temporary injunction in the courts and is prepared to 
appeal those rulings all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. The 
President will follow the law--as he has been doing--and comply with 
the injunction.
  But let me be clear to my Republican friends and to the American 
families impacted--for now--by the court's action. Nothing about the 
injunction compels the President to deport anyone he has identified as 
a low priority for enforcement.
  No matter how many lawsuits are filed, how many symbolic votes are 
held in Congress, or how many Federal agencies are shut down, there is 
nothing the Republican Party can do to force the President of the 
United States to deport DREAMers or go after the parents of U.S. 
citizens if they have no criminal record and have lived here for a 
while. And the Republicans know there is nothing they can do to force 
the President to deport 5 million people that he has said he is going 
to protect--nothing.
  For years, Congress has only provided enough funding to deport 4 
percent of the total undocumented population, or 400,000 people a year. 
Clearly, we in Congress know that only a small percentage of people 
will be targeted by our limited enforcement resources because that is 
the law that we here in Congress made.
  For all the talk about a rogue or imperial President, he is actually 
doing the job we asked him to do--to spend the limited enforcement 
resources we appropriated on doing what? Protecting the homeland by 
deporting the worst of the worst, not on DREAMers, not on the parents 
of U.S. citizens who have strong ties to this country and decades with 
no criminal background. The DACA program for DREAMers announced in 2012 
is still in place and renewals are happening right now, as we speak. It 
is 640,000 strong.
  So, under the enforcement priorities and under the DACA program, it 
is clear to me--and I want to make it clear to everyone at home--that 
the President has no plans to deport DREAMers or the parents of U.S. 
citizens who have never been involved in crime.
  Now, I know firsthand about numerous efforts to negotiate across the 
aisle--that the majority of our country and the majority of the 
Republican Party would like to have a functioning legal immigration 
system. But the impression the Republican Party is leaving with the 
American people--the only solution the Republicans are offering--is 
that they demand the deportation of DREAMers and the deportation of the 
parents of 5 million American citizens who would be protected--and 
continued to be protected--under the President's executive actions.
  This is what my colleagues fail to appreciate when they stand 
alongside the hard-liners and opponents of legal immigration: in their 
zeal to support noncitizens, Republicans are hurting themselves with 
citizens.
  In my district in Chicago, just like the rest of the country, there 
is no caste system where people who were born in the U.S. never mix 
with people who weren't born here. There are no differences between the 
people who came with a visa, the people who overstayed a visa, the 
people who never had a visa to begin with, and people who were born 
U.S. citizens.
  When we celebrate the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, believe it or 
not, we all sit at the same table. The undocumented are a part of our 
families, live in our neighborhoods, attend our churches, and are in 
classrooms with our children.
  What the Republican Party fails to see is that when they call for the 
deportation of DREAMers and long-term residents, they are calling for 
the deportation of our family members, our neighbors, and my children's 
classmates.
  Don't forget: most Latinos in America are not immigrants but are U.S.

[[Page H1168]]

citizens. So it should come as no surprise that when the 1 million or 
so Latino U.S. citizens turn 18 this year, they will not think fondly 
of the Republican Party--the party that is bent on deporting members of 
their families and their communities.
  Another statistic: 93 percent of Latinos under the age of 18 are U.S. 
citizens. Ninety-three percent of them are U.S. citizens. They will not 
have a warm and fuzzy feeling about the party that fought tooth and 
nail to throw out their moms and dads. And the 5 million citizens whose 
parents are undocumented--who worry every day about whether their 
families will remain intact--are going to remember which party was 
cruel to their moms and dads, using them as scapegoats and insinuating 
they are all criminals bringing diseases to this country.
  The Republican Party's goal of forcing the President to deport all 
the noncitizens they want deported will simply never be achieved until 
the Republican Party elects one of their own to the White House. And 
the strategy of the Republican Party--forcing this President to deport 
all the noncitizens they want deported--pretty much guarantees that one 
of their own isn't going to get to the White House anytime soon.

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