House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Democrats are abandoning Americans in need, especially the sizable and growing homeless population, to appease illegal aliens.
Appearing on a Breitbart News radio special for an hour in studio, McCarthy ripped the Democrats running for president who in the second night of their first debates all raised their hands when asked if they would provide taxpayer-funded government-run healthcare coverage for illegal aliens. Instead of helping Americans, particularly the homeless, McCarthy said the Democrats are more interested in helping illegal aliens:
“All ten of them did. And if you watch it, there’s a few defining moments there,” McCarthy said in the Breitbart News radio interview. “They’re trying to go further left than each other. So one puts their hand up; they all followed. But the idea of how far that party has left the Democratic Party, but now they want to give free health care to illegals. They want to have a borderless border. While at the same time, there is 130,000 homeless in California. Those are Americans—legal Americans—and we’re not going to care for those individuals, but we’re going to take more tax dollars, and we’re going to give you an incentive to come here illegally instead of the legal process that we all support, we all believe in, we all champion.”
McCarthy described the other “defining moment” of the first debates as when former Vice President Joe Biden said he is “out of time.”
“He really is out of time,” McCarthy said. “His time is up.”
The one-hour in-studio exclusive interview, which aired Saturday morning on Breitbart News Saturday and will air again on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, is the first and most comprehensive the House’s leading Republican has given detailing GOP plans to retake their House majority in 2020. In the interview, McCarthy laid out the numbers that Republicans need to hit to win back their majority in 2020 alongside President Donald Trump’s efforts to win reelection. He also discussed tech policy and immigration policy.
McCarthy explained that the reason why the left is abandoning Americans in favor of illegal aliens is because of the rising socialism inside the Democrat Party, which has overtaken the party’s standard-bearers.
“But the idea of this new socialist wing of the party, and it’s very concerning to me, because earlier this year, I took a bipartisan, bicameral trip to Latin America,” McCarthy said. “We went to the border of Venezuela and Colombia—50,000 people coming across every day. Twenty years ago, Venezuela was the jewel of Latin America. Colombia, nobody wanted to associate with. You look at Colombia today, with their free-market ideas, their rule of law, they moved back into a much different place economically. People are coming across that border just to be able to buy milk. Remember, Hugo Chavez came into power not by overthrowing, but by democracy. Then when he got the power, he changed the Constitution. He took over businesses. What happened? What do they offer you in Venezuela? Free health care, free education. You know what their free health care is? I watched: the hospitals are closed. The bathrooms are backed up. A doctor was doing some kind of procedure with an iPhone above with the light on because they didn’t have any electricity. Let me tell you something: children were being born, and they were putting them in shoeboxes. This is the challenge of what happens, and this is difficult to believe, but I listened to a congresswoman who said Venezuela is in trouble not because of their socialist policies, but because of sanctions from America. That is so misguided, but those are the new leaders of this socialist Democratic Party, and those are the ones that are driving these individuals who are running for president further to the left to try to outdo the next one.”
When asked what Republicans need to do should they retake the House majority in 2020, McCarthy explained that the GOP needs to tackle the problems with the asylum process.
“I think we have to explain why we have this crisis at the border because I hear from a lot of people saying you had the presidency, you had the Congress, you had the Senate, but nothing got done,” McCarthy said. “You really have to understand how government works; it takes 60 votes in the Senate. We came about 12 votes away from passing immigration reform in the House. What Nancy Pelosi did is held every single one of her Democrats and wouldn’t allow them to vote for it when a lot of them wanted to. You have to secure your borders. Everybody realizes that. But what we have in current law is what we call asylum. We want to be able to help those in fear. But what we’re finding is when you come into America, if you come across that border illegally, and you come from any other country than Mexico, you get to stay in this country and go through the legal system. If you’re from Mexico, you get sent back to Mexico. So they don’t treat everybody equally in this process.”
McCarthy further explained just how broken the asylum process is and how it negatively affects the situation on the border.
“Eighty percent of everybody who claims asylum finds out when they get to their court case, no, you don’t get asylum,” McCarthy said. “What’s interesting is people are coming from three main countries, but they’re going through two or three other countries before they get to America, but they don’t claim asylum in those other countries. Asylum is really the fear of your life, the fear of persecution, and others. This is what, this is giving the incentive for people to come here. We had just a month ago 144,000 people who were apprehended illegally crossing. Think of everybody who we missed. That’s going to get you more than a million people here illegally. We bring in a million new people every single year into citizenship.”
McCarthy said the abuse of the asylum system hurts legal immigrants.
“What it’s doing is it’s harming those who go through the legal process because we want people to become American citizens, but we want them to do it through the legal process,” McCarthy said. “How people come to America is the luck of the lottery. Then you have people in America who go get a Ph.D. or an engineering degree. Then we tell them they have to leave America and go to another country and compete against us. I think if we changed how that process worked, we tied some of it to education, to work, to skills-based, I think that would get there. I think we have common sense ideas that we can do right now to stop the crisis along the border. We have voted for a lot of border security. We need to make sure that gets put in. Then the idea is what you do with the immigration system currently. Half the people who are here illegally came here legally on the visa program. We can track a package, but we can’t track people. We could change that visa program to make it work for the process because you want to still be able to have it working. Then you’re out there with what do you do with the people who are here illegally, and you can make that work, but this is not a difficult issue, but it is one of our biggest crises that we have.”
He added that there are Democrats who are not in lockstep with Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the rising socialist “Squad” of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)—who are all driving the party further left on the issue. But, McCarthy said, Pelosi’s acquiescence to the “Squad” has silenced those Democrats not in line with the socialist wing of their party, making it impossible to get anything done.
“There are Democrats who don’t want to work on it,” McCarthy said. “When government was shut down earlier in the year, I watched this president say, “Let’s work on DACA and border security together.” The reason why he brought that up—DACA is a big issue—is because Nancy Pelosi has the record for the longest speech of anybody on the floor in the history of Congress. She went more than eight hours all over the issue of DACA. She had a moment where she could have solved that and done something with border security—again, another example of common ground where one person doesn’t get 100 percent of what they want, and the president asked her. I was in the room. She said no. She said no to an issue that she spoke about for more than eight hours on the floor. We had a window to get it done, but she does not want to help with anything else. I’ve watched Democrats who want to abolish ICE go after the border security with all of what those border agents have been doing. It’s atrocious what they say and do.”
The full interview with McCarthy aired on Breitbart News Saturday and will air again on Breitbart News Sunday, both programs that air on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel. Breitbart News Saturday airs from 10:00 a.m. ET to 1:00 p.m. ET on Saturdays, and Breitbart News Sunday airs from 7:00 p.m. ET to 10:00 p.m. ET on Sundays.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.