Bernie Sanders: If You Are Undocumented Or Have Committed a Crime, Most People Say “You’re Out Of Here”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in an interview with CNN host Anderson Cooper, acknowledged that most people would support deporting an undocumented immigrant. “Look, this is where I think the American people are at,” Sanders said. “If you are a drug dealer, if you are somebody in this country undocumented or has committed a crime, I think most people think, hey, have a nice day, you’re out of here. And I support that.”
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: How concerned are you about these continuing ICE efforts that we are seeing the videos of? A number of Republicans continue to say, Republican governors I’ve spoken to continue to say, look, they are going after the baddest of the bad people. We have wiretaps on people and investigations. I read a piece in The Atlantic that says they’re actually pulling people in FBI or elsewhere in law enforcement who are actually doing investigations on really bad people who are here illegally in order just to get body counts, in order to get the 3,000 people a day that Stephen Miller has told multiple people in the administration that he wants. SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Look, this is where I think the American people are at. If you are a drug dealer, if you are somebody in this country undocumented or has committed a crime, I think most people think, hey, have a nice day, you’re out of here. And I support that. But the truth is that the vast majority of the people who are being picked up, put on, put in vans, sent to detention centers and God knows what else. These are people who do not have criminal records in the United States of America. And I should tell you that many of them, many of them, the majority of them are hardworking people doing some of the most difficult, dirty, underpaid work in this country. They are the people who are harvesting our crops. They’re working in meatpacking plants. They are working in nursing homes for starvation wages. They’re working in child care centers for inadequate wages. During COVID, in many respects, this is a group of people who are the essential workers. They kept our economy going and some of them died in the process. They’re raising their kids here. So I think the American people feel, yeah, we need a strong border. Yeah, we need to get criminal elements or undocumented out of this country. But I think the American people are sick and tired of seeing hardworking people being treated the way they are treated. And in some cases, Anderson, if you can believe it, picked up and sent to Sudan. Now what is that about? I mean, how cruel is that to send people to a country they don’t know the language, they know it’s a country in falling apart. So I have a lot of concerns about what Trump is doing in terms of mass deportation.
