One of the top House Republican leaders, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), revealed this week that GOP leaders intend to push an amnesty bill in the next Congress that would subject only the most dangerous illegal immigrant criminals to deportation so that “not one person” who is in the country illegally and has not committed a violent crime is “thrown out.”
During a Wednesday evening House Rules Committee hearing in which pro-amnesty Democrats such as Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) testified, Sessions, the powerful Rules Committee Chairman, said House Republican leaders want to have a “well understood agreement about what the law should be and how we as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities, create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote ‘thrown out’ or ‘deported’ – where we do keep families together, but what we do is we do so under a rule of law of an understanding.”
Sessions said, “We intend to push a bill that would operate under the activity of trying to do under rule of law… But that, even in our wildest dream, would not be to remove any person that might be here unless they were dangerous to this country and committed a crime… that was never even in a plan that I thought about.”
The Texas Congressman took offense and said it was “inflammatory” that Democrats like Gutierrez are accusing Republicans of wanting to deport 13 million illegal immigrants.
“No reasonable person in my party… has suggested this except the outer-extreme of my party,” Sessions said. “And on both parties, people have made extreme remarks. There is no one in responsible Republican leadership elected officials [sic] that has said we should deport 13 or 11 million people. That is not what this effort is about, and I find it extremely distasteful that people would come here and suggest things that we have not suggested.”
Sessions said that it became “dramatically” more difficult to pass an amnesty bill last year when pro-amnesty activists started hectoring and confronting Republicans at their homes or at restaurants. He said he has told the pro-amnesty agitators that, “we will appropriately get things done, but that is the wrong way to do it.”
In the meantime, Sessions said Obama’s executive amnesty is “ill-advisable, wrong, and not the right thing to do.” He said Obama “did not need to play king,” and “the President of the United States is using this as an excuse for political purposes to make my party – [the] Republican party and people – look bad.
Sessions also emphasized to Gutierrez that he has told him “numerous times about what we were trying to do” and hope the two could work together on a more permanent amnesty bill in the next Congress.
“And what I intend to say to you today is, ‘My friend, I want to work with you;’ but I would ask that we please understand that we cannot overplay what we’re really trying to do, and that is we’re trying to work through a difficult process,” Sessions told Gutierrez, noting that “at least three Texans” have “spent a lot of time trying to broker this deal, and everybody knows that, about a year ago, when different changes happened, we fell apart.”
After revealing that House Republican leaders seem intent on giving permanent legal status to nearly every illegal immigrant in the country, Sessions declared that, “I believe that without rule of law, we have no border; with no border, we have no sovereignty; without sovereignty, we do not have a United States of America.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.