In a notable exchange with an undocumented immigrant Thursday night, House Speaker Paul Ryan rejected Donald Trump's "deportation force," a highly popular pronouncement with the incoming pr*sident's nativist supporters.
"Do you think that I should be deported and many of the families in my situation should?" the mom, who was herself brought here as an 11-year-old girl, asked at the CNN town hall event in Washington.
"No," Ryan responded bluntly. "I can see that you love your daughter, you're a nice person who has a great future ahead of you and I hope your future is here. ... But if you're worried about some deportation force coming knocking on your door this year, don't worry about it."
Ryan went on to say that they also have to come up with "a solution" for some 800,000 DACA recipients, who were brought here as children and later granted temporary deportation relief by President Obama.
The good news for Ryan: There is a DACA solution and it's called the BRIDGE Act, introduced this week in both the House and the Senate with strong bipartisan support. If Ryan wants a solution, he needs to give BRIDGE a vote.
But as with all things Ryan, his remarks at the town hall come with a big asterisk.
"What we have to do is find a way to make sure that you can get right with the law. [...] We have to figure out how to fix this, but to do that, people need to have confidence that our laws are being followed, and that we actually know who's coming and going and that we actually have a secure border. [...]
When people get confidence in this country that our border is secured, that our laws are being enforced, then I really believe the country, all people in the country, will be in a much better position to fix these thornier, bigger problems.”
First of all, Ryan is complicit here with Republicans who doomed immigration reform by continually claiming that immigrants were flooding across the border and our immigration laws weren’t being enforced. That’s what he’s implying here.
Neither is true. Barack Obama has deported more people than any other president. And unauthorized immigration into the U.S. is essentially flat and has been for half a decade—with as many immigrants leaving the U.S. as coming in.
It was House Republicans who killed immigration reform in 2013 after it had passed the Senate with bipartisan support. And they killed it with their constant misinformation campaign. If Ryan wants to get the American people “in a much better position” to tackle immigration reform, he needs to start by leveling with them.
Watch the exchange: