Removing illegal immigrants will not be a “focus” of a Trump administration, says Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, a longstanding supporter of open borders and cheap labor.
Less than a week after President-elect Donald J. Trump’s historic upset, Speaker Ryan is now telling voters that he will not enact a central part of Trump’s “mandate” given to him by the American people: namely, Trump’s repeated pledge to enforce U.S. immigration law and to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do its job by removing people in the country illegally.
“We are not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump’s not planning on that,” Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union.
“I think we should put people’s minds at ease: That is not what our focus is. That is not what we’re focused on. We’re focused on securing the border. We think that’s first and foremost, before we get into any other immigration issue, we’ve got to know who’s coming and going into the country– we’ve got to secure the border,” Ryan said.
Yet, as Vice President-elect Mike Pence explained during the Vice Presidential debate the nation already has a “deportation force”.
“We have a deportation force. It is called Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” Pence said, and “for the first time in their history, their union endorsed Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States.”
Indeed, the ICE union backed Trump, in part, because he pledged that he would allow ICE to do its job and enforce U.S. immigration law.
“We are going to triple the number of ICE deportation officers,” Trump said during his Arizona immigration speech. “Within ICE, I am going to create a new special Deportation Task Force, focused on identifying and removing quickly the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice.”
Interestingly, while the National ICE Council endorsed Trump for President, the council’s president has had strong words for Speaker Ryan in the past.
“[A]s House Speaker, you have not spoken out about any of the issues confronting our officers or the threat to public safety presented by the lawless immigration policies of the Obama Administration… your office has not reached out to us in any way,” the President of the ICE Council wrote in an August letter to Ryan.
“Foreign nationals flood across the border because they have been led to believe that if they make it here, they can stay. I am sorry to say that your rhetoric could be adding to that perception,” the ICE president wrote to Ryan. “While specific members of Congress have been vocal in standing up for our officers and fighting to defend law and order, we have not felt that same support from the Speaker’s office.”
“ICE officers have… been disturbed to hear some of the recent comments made by the Republican House Speaker,” the ICE Council President added. “Your 2015 spending bill funded sanctuary cities, the resettlement of illegal alien border crossers, the release of criminal aliens and executive amnesty—policies which jeopardize the safety and security of the American people.”
While reports have documented that the border surge is currently the worst it’s ever been, the ICE Council president said that as House Speaker, Ryan has pushed policies that would only “exacerbate the situation”:
In the nine months that you have served as House Speaker, I am not aware of you holding a single press conference devoted exclusively to addressing this national crisis. Indeed, we were disheartened to learn that instead, the House Speaker intends to push and fund policies, which we believe would only exacerbate the situation.
In the letter, the National ICE Council demanded a meeting with Speaker Ryan. Yet Ryan never responded and never met with the council’s president.
By contrast, Donald Trump reached out and met with the nation’s ICE officers to discuss how to keep America safe.
“It was extremely clear that this guy is on law enforcement’s side,” said the nation’s ICE Council president said after the meeting in August. “[Trump] made no bones about it—he wants the rule of law followed in our country, and he wants to make America safe… He made clear he’s on the side of law and order, and is on the side of the American public.”
Similarly, when grieving mothers, who were forced to bury their loved ones as a result of illegal alien crime, tried to meet with Ryan, the Speaker of the House literally fled from them.
Ryan “doesn’t care [about our families] one bit,” said Laura Wilkerson, whose 18-year-old son was tied up, beaten, strangled, set on fire, and tortured to death by his illegal alien classmate.
By contrast, Trump met with these families and said, “of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.”
These mothers and fathers have said that Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate to ever make them “feel heard”.
“Paul Ryan is personally responsible for the deaths, maimings, and sexual assaults of thousands of innocent Americans and lawful residents,” the grieving angel moms wrote in August.
“Paul Ryan has never shown one millionth the passion in defense of our families as he has spent advocating for policies that would result in the deaths of more Americans… [He] has the blood of so many on his hands—blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, immigrants, and children of immigrants… If Ryan’s considerable powers had been marshaled, in any serious degree, towards advocating for our families, demanding change for our families, or insisting upon justice for our families, then so many more families just like us would have been saved. For all of these reasons and more, we deem Ryan disqualified from serving in Congress or any other position of public office that is supposed to represent the American people.”
Throughout the campaign, Ryan repeatedly made statements that seemed designed to undermine Trump’s candidacy. Now that Trump has won, Ryan’s comments seem to underscore conservatives’ concerns that Ryan as House Speaker will not only refuse to help Trump enact the mandate given to him by the American people, but he will also work to actively undermine that mandate– for instance, by not making enforcing U.S. immigration law a “focus” of a Trump administration.
As Ed Martin, Phyllis Schlafly’s hand-picked successor and president of her Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, told Breitbart News:
On Tuesday, November 8, the American voters showed conclusively that Paul Ryan is not the leader for this moment in our history. The message is clear: Ryan’s judgment was rejected! […] Now is the time to move forward on the Trump agenda, not back to the failed Ryan policies. […] Paul Ryan should yield to a new Republican leader whose policy positions and political judgment are in line with the Trump Republican Party.
It is unclear whether members of the House Freedom Caucus and conservative lawmakers—including Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Jeff Duncan, Jim Bridenstine, Mo Brooks, Brian Babin, Steve King, Matt Salmon, Alex Mooney, Gary Palmer, Barry Loudermilk, John Fleming and others—who voted for Ryan last year will vote to elect him again as House Speaker.
According to Pew polling data, Paul Ryan’s expansionist agenda on immigration stands opposed to more than 9 in 10 GOP voters.
Republican lawmakers are set to hold leadership elections this coming Tuesday, November 15.
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