I’m sorry he’s not going to be our next governor.
Labrador: Dems ‘don’t really care about the families, they want no enforcement of immigration law’
While 1st District GOP Rep. Raul Labrador has had no comment to Idaho reporters for the past week-plus on immigration, despite repeated inquiries as House Republicans wrestle with the issue, he did make some comments on Thursday to a group of Washington, D.C.
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“Yes, we are all receiving phone calls, and if you don’t react to those pictures you’re not human,” Labrador said. “I mean, you have to understand that watching those pictures is devastating.”
He went on: “But I also want the media to concentrate on the other pictures that I have seen, the pictures of the rape tree in Mexico, northern Mexico, where girls are being raped and they know that that is the price that they have to pay to come to the United States.”
He apparently was referring to reports of rampant sexual assault against women and girls making the trek through Mexico to the U.S., including some reports that victims’ garments were hung on trees.
Labrador continued, “The pictures of the children that are dying in trafficking incidents. The children that are being lost because we have allowed a culture that has increased illegal immigration into the United States and that has encouraged families to leave their children alone, to actually send them on these trips that are hundreds and hundreds of miles by themselves. You have children that are coming to the United States that are as young as 5 years old and younger, all on their own.”
Labrador said far more migrant children who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors are now in federal detention facilities than the roughly 2,000 who have been separated from their parents by authorities at the border. “So think about if you’re a parent: Would you send your child for hundreds and hundreds of miles with these traffickers, these people that are evil people that are doing harm to them during the trip? So don’t just think about the kids at the detention facilities. Think about all the children.”
He added, “What the media is trying to do right now is to portray, they want to agree with the Democrats that the policy should be catch-and-release. Remember that, what the Democrats want here is catch-and-release. They don’t really care about the families. They want to have no enforcement of immigration law.”
Labrador cited a recent poll by The Economist and YouGov that he said showed most Americans disagree with Democrats on immigration policy. “The bottom line is that only 19 percent of the American people support the Democrat position,” he said. “The vast majority of the American people understand that we have to have a zero-tolerance policy for people coming to the United States. What they want is they want to keep the families together while they’re being detained, and that’s what we’re trying to do as Republicans, because if you allow these children, if you allow catch-and-release to happen, you will see more children raped, more children murdered, more children die because of the bad policies of the previous administration.”