GOP Rep. Mike Lawler: “Not Practical” To Round Up 25 Million Undocumented People And Kick Them All Out
New York GOP Rep. Mike Lawler told ABC’s “This Week” that he believes it is “not practical” to “round up” and deport the 25+ million illegal aliens in the U.S. right now Lawler wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week: “We Need to Wake Up After Minneapolis”
REP. MIKE LAWLER: This is an issue that I’ve been focused on for years. For 40 years, we have not solved our immigration crisis. The American people were rightly outraged by what happened under the Biden administration, where you had over 10.5 million migrants cross our border, most of them illegally. The porous southern border needed to be shut down. President Trump did that. The fact is that we have had nine straight months of net zero illegal border crossings. You’ve had 675,000 people deported, 1.9 million people self-deport. Many of those folks, criminal aliens or people who have been involved in the criminal justice system, the American people overwhelmingly support that. But what they do believe, if you’ve been in this country, right or wrong, for five, 10, 15, 20 years, your children and your grandchildren are American citizens. People don’t want to see families broken apart. And so, there’s got to be a legal path forward, not a path to citizenship, but a legal path forward for people to come out of the shadows so that they can work legally, that they can pay their taxes, pay any back taxes owed, pay a fine, not collect government benefits, and not commit a crime. That is the basis of the Dignity Act, so that we can actually start to solve a crisis that has been in effect for 40 years. We have over 25 million people in this country who are undocumented. You’re not rounding them all up and kicking them out. It’s not realistic. So, how do you deal with this in a way that is both compassionate, but tough? And I guarantee you, 10 out of 10 would take the deal to forego citizenship to have a legal path forward. And we have a broad bipartisan coalition that has come together behind that. There’s over 30 co-sponsors, Republicans and Democrats. And in my opinion, that is a key component of actually fixing this problem. It is not amnesty. It is not just letting people stay in this country. The fact is, they would forego citizenship. They would not get the right to vote. They would, however, have a legal path forward.
