[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16550]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1015
                          A POWERFUL COALITION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, over the last several weeks, I visited 
six high schools in my district to meet with juniors and seniors, about 
2,000 students in total.
  Almost all of the students I meet are U.S. citizens. The majority are 
Latinos. Some have immigrant parents, and most will soon be eligible to 
vote.
  All of them have one question for me. It starts every Q and A at 
every high school I visit. The questions are about Donald Trump. Is he 
going to be our next President? Is it true that he wants to revoke our 
citizenship and deport us to the countries our parents came from? Is it 
true he wants to round us up, Mr. Gutierrez, and deport us all?
  It is very sad when the questions a Congressman gets from American 
high school students are about how much they should fear their own 
government, whether their own government is going to break up their 
families, whether their own government is going to treat them not as 
citizens and as equal partners, but as outsiders and pariahs in their 
own country.
  When they hear that Trump is ``leading in the polls,'' they think 
that means there is a pretty good chance that he will be the next 
President. When they see him on TV shows like Jimmy Fallon, not to 
mention CNN and Fox News, they get the feeling that he is a celebrity 
that all of us in America admire.
  When they hear that Trump is hosting ``Saturday Night Live''--not 
just being a guest but actually hosting, even after saying Mexican are 
mostly rapists, criminals, and drug dealers--they get the impression 
that calling whole groups of people rapists, criminals, and drug 
dealers based on their ethnicity or national origin is basically okay 
with us in America.
  The real question these Chicago-area high school students have is: 
Hey, Gutierrez, what are you going to do to defend us from Donald 
Trump? What are you going to do to stand up for us?
  This leads to an intense discussion about American politics. And I 
ask the students right back: What are you going to do to stand up for 
yourselves, for your community?
  Look, motivating 17- and 18-year-olds to do something is not always 
easy, including motivating them to register to vote when they are old 
enough and to actually go out and vote. But when I ask these young 
Americans whether they plan to get registered and vote, every hand goes 
up in the classroom.
  Donald Trump is spurring youth voter mobilization like I have never 
seen before. Nationally, we know that 93 percent of Latinos under the 
age of 18 are citizens of the United States and that every 30 seconds a 
Latino citizen turns 18. That is about a million a year for the next 
decade or so. If they are half as motivated as the young people I am 
talking to in Chicago, Donald Trump could have a tremendous impact on 
the youth vote in the coming election.
  But let's be honest, do we really want to motivate civic 
participation through fear of deportation, racial profiling, and 
families being broken up? These are American teenagers growing up to 
distrust their government.
  Trump wants to take us back to the good old days of race relations, 
which apparently means the 1950s, when President Eisenhower evicted 
millions of immigrants and U.S. citizens from the United States. Dr. 
Carson, who believes that human history is only about 5,000 years old--
that is what he says, we have only been around 5,000 years--says of 
mass deportation schemes: ``I think it's worth discussing.''
  Here in the House, we have considered measures to deport children 
more quickly, to make groups more distrustful of the police, and to 
delay Homeland Security funding.
  Testifying on one of these bills before the Rules Committee last 
year, I made the unfortunate but real suggestion that Republicans were 
gravitating toward mass deportation policies, which provoked a response 
from the chairman, Mr. Sessions. He said: Gutierrez, ``there is no one 
in responsible Republican leadership that has said we should deport 13 
or 11 million people. And I find it extremely distasteful that people 
would come here and suggest things that we have not suggested.''
  Well, now that people are suggesting mass deportation openly and are 
gaining in the public opinion polls in the Republican Party, I wonder 
why there is so much silence from the Republican Members of this body.
  But it is not just young Latino voters in Chicago that are being 
motivated by Republican attacks. When Republicans attack Planned 
Parenthood and block laws to guarantee equal pay for women, that 
motivates women to register and vote. When Republicans celebrate people 
who will not issue marriage licenses to two men or two women, a lot of 
people in the LGBT community get motivated to register and vote.
  When Republicans rail against unions and block increases in the 
minimum wage, while, of course, they earn $174,000 a year, and block 
environmental standards and block sensible gun laws, a lot of working 
class and middle class Americans get motivated to register and vote.
  Together with those young people I talked about at those high 
schools, we are forming a very, very powerful coalition, a coalition so 
powerful that some day, even Republicans themselves will want to be 
part of it.

                          ____________________