Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” while discussing President Donald Trump’s new executive order limiting travel to the United States from six Muslim-majority countries, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) said it was “cruel, it’s wrong, and it’s the same beef stew warmed over,” adding, “I hope people use their First Amendment right to express their opposition by protesting in the streets.”
Partial transcript as follows:
ELLISON: It’s the old Muslim ban lawyered up a little bit, but the intent is the same, the basic impact on people will be very similar. It takes off one country. Interestingly enough, if you look at acts of terrorism committed in the United States and the country of origin, of the people who committed those acts, the top ones are Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. None of them are on that ban. But you do have Somalia, a lot of my constituents hail from there, a massive famine and drought. People will die, are dying and yet they are being excluded. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s cruel, it’s wrong, and it’s the same beef stew warmed over. I expect the same effect will happen in the courts because he said he campaigned on a Muslim ban, within days after his inauguration, he went forward on that Muslim ban and he made a few tweaks but it’s still the same thing.
MITCHELL: I know we’ve had reporting that Rachel Maddow did exclusively last week, which showed that from the intelligence unit inside Homeland Security, there is evidence that the children of refugees and of other immigrants come here and are not radicalized, that in fact —
ELLISON: Right.
MITCHELL: And the parents are not radicalized. When people get radicalized, it’s more than a decade later from their experiences here in the United States. So there’s no intelligence justification for so-called extreme vetting according to these documents.
ELLISON: That’s right. Well, people are vetted pretty extremely already. People wait in refugee camps for 18 months, 24 months. This is not the problem. This really is a political move designed to satiate his base who believes that there is things to fear out there from refugees. The truth is that this is nothing but demagoguery by the president and it’s sad. And I hope people use their First Amendment right to express their opposition by protesting in the streets and writing letters and talking to their members of Congress. I hope that people really do stand up and say this is not what we believe our America is, and we believe in an inclusive America that welcomes immigrants and refugees. And that of course we’re going to be as safe, but at the same time there’s no reason to whip up unnecessary fears, as the president’s trying to do.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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