Tuesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” network legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli was “un-American” for changing the words of the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Host Wolf Blitzer played a clip of an NPR interview in which Cuccinelli changed the poem to, “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”
Tobin said, “It is hard to define un-American but that statement was un-American. And I say this as the descendant of a hundred years ago, people who came to this country looking for opportunity and found it — that is why people have come here, they don’t want to be public charges. But they come here and they work hard and a lot of them work in terrible jobs for low pay and sometimes they need food stamps to eat — to feed their families.”
He continued, “That is who — that is who is going to be penalized. Not the people who hire the illegal immigrants, who are — they always get away under the Trump Administration. But the people who are working hard and trying to support they’re families, they’re the ones who are punished by this and it is just a disgrace that that is the prevailing ethos of our administration.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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