The FRONTLINE Interviews

Luis Gutierrez

Former U.S. Representative (D-IL)

Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat, served as a U.S. representative for Illinois from 1993 to 2019. He has long been an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform and has been an outspoken critic of both the Obama and Trump administrations’ immigration policies.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder conducted on August 21, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Zero Tolerance

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Luis Gutierrez

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Failed Immigration Reform

OK.So I’m going to jump back post-RNC [Republican National Committee], Republican Party.There’s a bipartisan working group in the Senate called the Gang of Eight.… Who are they?What are they trying to achieve?

Well, this is a bipartisan group of senators that are going to not only put together a comprehensive immigration bill, but they’re going to make sure that it has not 51 votes, not 60 votes, but as many votes as possible so that they can send this ship to the House with a full headwind, right?Therefore, it just—so that’s how they got the 68 votes.If I recall correctly, they threw in billions of dollars for Border Patrol in the waning days of the debate in order to get an additional two or three Republicans to join.

What I think is significant about this bipartisan approach are two things: Number one is that Democrats are 100%.It’s not 99, and it’s 100% in the Senate, and they’re ready to go forward.And [John] McCain is still there, and Jeff Flake is still there, and there are still actors on the Republican side that are looking to broker a deal.Now, this all happens, I believe, motivated by two key factors.

Number one, Barack Obama doesn’t want to be sent into the history books as “deporter in chief.”He made a promise when he ran for president in 2008 that he would bring about comprehensive immigration reform, and he was going to damn well make sure he did it in his second term in Congress.And [Mitt] Romney lost, and they did the “autopsy.”The Republicans say: “We just can’t do this anymore.And so what we need to do is do comprehensive immigration reform so that we can speak to a broader audience, because our demographics are getting smaller and smaller.”And so I think those things were working.

Part of the mistake was to believe that if you had a robust, huge number of senators that somehow that would break the glue that keeps the Republicans in the House together, which is being anti-immigrant.That is the glue that keeps them together.Well, I never believed that that was going to work because it was going to look like it was an Obama Democratic Senate control when you have a Republican control.

I would have thought you might want to do it in a bicameral way.So in 2003 and ’04, when I worked with [Sen. Ted] Kennedy and McCain, in the House I had Jeff Flake as my partner and Kennedy and McCain in the Senate, and we put forward a bipartisan, bicameral bill.That’s not what they did in this case.So we had our Gang of Eight, and every time they would reach a compromise in the Senate and overcome an obstacle, my Republican House colleagues would say, “Well, we can’t do that because we can’t show that we’re—we have to be stronger on immigration.”

And so it didn’t help.But on the other hand, wow, 68 senators, bipartisan, broad, comprehensive bill.

… So there isn’t a perfect equation for this, because even that bill that was supported across the board by everyone still left millions of immigrants outside of the legal framework of our immigration system.But it was a great move forward.The Senate moved forward, and we were doing the same thing in the House.Ours fell apart in the House of Representatives.We just couldn’t move forward on it.

Jeff Sessions in the Senate

Let me ask you about a particular senator, Jeff Sessions.Do you remember watching Sen. Sessions around this time period, and can you describe a little bit about his opposition to—?

So Sen. Jeff Sessions was the key opponent and key force against progress in the Senate on the comprehensive bipartisan immigration.He led the charge with his sidekick, Stephen Miller, who was there along the way.They led the charge.And when it passed the Senate, they just deluged with information and advocacy on the House side where they had a ready and, you know, willing and receptive group of people to their message: “We will not allow this to get done.We will not allow the Senate to act on it.”

And so he was the leading crusader.I mean, he had made this a key issue in his senatorial tenure, immigration, and he was going to do everything he could to stop it.So he was the key person.There always seems to be a key person.If it’s for women’s rights, there’s a key person against it.If it’s for civil rights, and he would have been—he goes down in history as the key person against immigration and immigration reform.He would have—and then he came over, obviously, to the House side, which is a simple walk, a very short walk over to us, and engaged my colleagues.And it just made it increasingly more difficult to get it done.

Somebody described it to us as “flooding the zone”; that Miller and Sessions—Miller in particular—were sending stories to Breitbart.Breitbart was pushing sort of anti-immigration—

We could go to that now.

—rhetoric, but also around this time period, he’s coming over to the House, I guess?

He’s coming over to the House.They’re bringing messages; they’re bringing stacks of documents and papers and talking points and just telling us just how bad immigrants are and lying about the immigration bill.Everybody was going to get a cell phone.I remember that being one of the big—I mean, just one of the silly things that they would use, right?This is an immigration bill that’s just going to—oh, they were all going to become citizens instantaneously.I remember that, right?The Democrats are going to have millions of new followers that are ready when, indeed, the bill established first a 10-year bar against citizenship, right?And if you really examine the bill, it would take 15 to 17 years if that’s the approach you wanted to take.And given that, statistically speaking, Latinos, which seem to be their greatest fear in terms of immigrants becoming citizens, right, and Mexican nationals being the largest number, right, they’re the least likely to apply for American citizenship relative to Asians and Europeans and people from other spheres of the world, right?But they sure have done a lot to motivate them to become citizens now, and their actions and their rhetoric have certainly spurred the kind of action that they thought was natural and immediate in that bill.

So they came with fear.And maybe I could ask you: Who’s the chief of staff now?Who’s the chief of staff now, because I think this is important: [Mick] Mulvaney.I remember Mulvaney.Mulvaney was in the House of Representatives, and Mulvaney would be in South Carolina speaking to his constituents in Spanish and chastising the Republican Party, saying, “We’re going to be a party that’s eliminating any future for ourselves, because demographically, we don’t have any space in which to grow.”And now he’s the acting who-knows-what chief of staff of this president currently.So those are the kinds of things that I remember going on.

Defeating Eric Cantor

Let me ask you about a split that starts to happen, which is the David Brat candidacy and that race.So Gang of Eight’s passed the Senate; it’s likely to head your way.But this race, it was a bit of a showdown for that establishment RNC group that we’ve been talking about, but then also some of these voices from the outside.Can you tell me what—?

So that was—

That was ’14.

And he defeated—

[House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor.

Yeah, OK.So, within the House of Representatives, there is a group of Republicans who said to me and to others: “We are not going to take up the Senate bill.We don’t care if it’s 100 to zero.But we are ready to take on our own party establishment and many in the House of Representatives and the Republican Caucus.”Cantor was one of them—not publicly, really not that public, right?… But there was one thing Republicans didn’t want to do, and that was get on board with an immigration bill until after their primaries, after the Republican primaries.And actually, Cantor was the last.At least for the purposes of moving forward on immigration reform in the House of Representatives, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives would only move forward on immigration reform after the Cantor election.

That morning, I remember speaking to members of the leadership in the Republican Party because I was concerned, and I said, “How’s everything going?”“Oh, he’s doing fine.He’s going to win by 11, 12 points.”And I said, “OK.”“And tomorrow we’re going to speak with [Speaker of the House John] Boehner.We’re taking in the proposal to Boehner.”It was that election …—people have to understand that we had done a lot of work.We were waiting for Cantor to get reelected, and the next day.… And he lost.The nativists will tell you that he lost exclusively on the issue of immigration.

…I knew that night when I heard.I was talking to my Republican—they were basically: “There’s no reason for us to talk anymore.This is not going anywhere.”And you see that immediately thereafter, Boehner does not seek reelection, and he’s not going to be the speaker, and you see the rise of none other than my friend in this immigration bill, Paul Ryan, assume the speakership with the promise to the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives, “I will never bring up an immigration bill.”Wow.What a change of fortunes, especially when you consider that Paul Ryan stood with me in Chicago in 2013.This is after the attack during the Boston Marathon.He still stood up for immigrant—for comprehensive and a pathway to citizenship.And he was an original sponsor of our 2004 bill with McCain, Kennedy, Flake and I [sic].He was an original sponsor of that bill.

To then take this position, we knew that it was—we were going to have to take over the majority again.Democrats and pro-immigrant forces were going to have to work to take over the majority if we were going to see the light of day again.

What did it tell you about the party and the shift?

Here’s what it told me about the party and the shift.I always knew that in the House of Representatives, the glue that kept the Republican Party was immigration, right, and being anti-immigrant.And so it was always a difficult hurdle in the House of Representatives.

… It meant that we would not have any action on immigration reform for the foreseeable future; that the 2016 election was going to become evermore important.But there are some positives that occurred.Finally, immigrants had a solid base of support in the House and in the Senate.Democrats had finally stepped up and stood up and were ready to keep their promises for immigration reform and to work tirelessly and committed to getting it done.

… And you know who else that became clear to?Barack Obama.It became clear to him.And so Cantor’s defeat leads us to the next, which is Obama who was reluctant, who said to me and others, right, “I’m not a king; I’m not a dictator; I can’t just do this,” you know, with the kind of—under that was, “I’m a Harvard-educated lawyer; you can’t do that stuff,” and bringing about very broad-based, right?

So we went from protecting “Dreamers” to protecting 5, 6 million people.It was called DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents], and the president announced it, and of course they immediately went to court, the Republicans, to stop it.But it would have said: “God, the 5 million American citizen children?We’re going to protect their moms and dads.”And that’s a step in the right direction.And so we broadened it, and Barack Obama did the right thing, and he became a champion, and he traveled across the country talking about the need for immigration reform but taking actions to protect and defend as many people as possible.

The Dreamers and DACA

… Could you tell me just who the Dreamers are and what is the policy that Obama—just set that up a little bit.

So very early on, 2001, 2002, [Sen.] Dick Durbin has a proposal for the Dreamers; I have a proposal for the Dreamers.Who are they?We said, “Well, children should not be held responsible for actions of their parents.”And the Dreamers were brought here at a very young, tender age, right—3, 4, 6, 7 years of age, with their parents.And they’re undocumented, too.But they know no other country than the United States of America, because I challenge anybody watching this program: Go back, if you can remember when you were 3 or 4 years old, what can you possibly remember?

The only flag they ever pledged allegiance to was America.The only country they ever knew was America.The music, the culture, the idiosyncrasies, the mores, everything was American about them.As a matter of fact, when they spoke, you could not distinguish them from children of American citizens born in the United States of America.

So we said: “God, they’re American in everything but a piece of paper.Shouldn’t we set them aside?”So we proposed the DREAM [Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors] Act, which would allow them to get a green card.They would have to continue to go to school, and they had to graduate from high school.There were lots of rules.You know, they couldn’t have any—they’d have to go through a criminal background check, and they’d have to pay for all of this themselves, right?They’d have to go and find the money for the criminal background check.I think it was like 600 bucks, the total fee.And we proposed it, and we pushed it moving forward.

Now, there were many good things about having a DREAM Act, but there were other people who said, “Well, let’s just do the DREAM Act.”Well, what about their moms and dads?What about the millions of other undocumented immigrants in this country?But in 2010, in the lame-duck session, we got the Democratic leadership to give us a vote, and we won.People need to recognize that if they had given us a vote earlier, we could have done the same thing on immigration reform.Well, we did it for the Dreamers.

And many won’t remember, it went over to the House, and they were so anti-immigrant in the House that even original sponsors of the Dream Act voted against cloture in the Senate vote.Now, did we lose two three Democrats?We did.But we lost all the Republicans who wouldn’t stand up, even though they were original sponsors of the bill.It’s like you propose something, you get a vote on it, and you say, “Nah, I’m not going to vote for that.”Who does that?Most politicians are dying to have some legislation engraved with their name, right?Put a plaque and get in the history books.No, not on immigration and not for the Dreamers.

The Trump Campaign

Let me jump to the ’15-16 campaign and Donald Trump’s presidential announcement in Trump Tower, the rhetoric he’s using about immigration.You’re watching that and you’re thinking what?

I’m really, really fearful, because I saw suddenly just going back.So you have to understand that I saw it through the prism of somebody who grew up when “separate but equal” was the law of the land in 1953, when there were—people told me to go back where I came from frequently.It was like a rite of passage if you were Puerto Rican, born an American citizen in this country, to have someone challenge your right to be in this country.So I had seen that.

And I had seen what discrimination and bigotry—and I said to myself, we’ve forged such a better world for all of us, right, not only for Latinos and immigrants and Puerto Ricans but for women and gay people and environmentalists and working men and women.I said to myself, wow, we’re in such a better place.And when he said that, I said, “Wow.”I heard what he said before, but had never heard a candidate for president of the United States say it.

And at the same time, I feared.Everybody said: “Ah, he’s a clown.He can’t win.He’s an outlier.You know, he’s from The Apprentice.He’s not ever going to become president of the United States.He can’t beat the Democratic nominee.”And I remember warning people, “You know, you cannot let this kind of hatred and bigotry go without a response, without a strong energetic response,” to the point that when I drafted a letter to NBC saying, “Please don’t put this man on Saturday Night Live, because that will regularize, right?That will normalize.That will say he’s part of American cultural mainstream.”That’s the way I looked—I looked at Saturday Night Live not just as an hour, a couple of hours in which you laughed, but the mainstreaming of who he was.

And I remember political commentators and me going on cable network TV and saying: “Oh, Luis, you’re against the freedom of speech.He has a right to speak.”And I said, “Be careful.”And so that’s what I saw.Now, because I heard someone, I said: “I believe he’s going to—if this is how he’s going to start his campaign, this is how he’s going to end his campaign.This is going to be fundamental to who he is and his campaign and how he’s going to bring people forward.”

And I had seen it before.Nothing that Donald Trump said was original to Donald Trump.Just no one had ever run for president and had the kind of platform that he had, and wasn’t taken seriously, as he should have been, as he was when he said it, to come down: “Mexicans are murderers, rapists, drug dealers.There’s a few good ones, but we’ve got to get rid of them.”

Here’s the other thing I understood very clearly: that this was about Latinos.This is about brown people.I hope the American public understands that when right-wing politicians say Mexicans, they really mean Hispanics; they really mean Latinos.They really mean all of us, regardless of whether we were born in this country or we came as an immigrant, whether we have legal status or no legal status.We are all the same.

And if you need any proof of it, look how Puerto Rico was treated after [Hurricane] Maria.All American citizens, but what did Donald Trump say?“They want the government to do it all for them.”In other words, we were lazy, and therefore we shouldn’t be helped.And look at El Paso.Do you think the murderer distinguished between the Latinos that were born here, the ones that had papers and the ones who had recently arrived?No.He was going after Latinos.And we see the kind of hatred and we see the kind of bigotry just against our community.We see it all of the time.

We’re not alone.Muslims feel it; gay people feel it; women feel it.But the hate is there, and that began.And then he became president of the United States of America, and he filled this vacuum.And who did he surround himself with?He surrounded himself with [Sen.] Jeff Sessions.When he wore that MAGA hat, I said, “This is like Jeff Sessions’ dream come true,” right?“This is the man who stopped immigration reform.This is the man who has created all of this anti-immigrant energy in the political sphere of America, and now he has a candidate for president, and he’s willing to diminish himself,” because I thought it was kind of silly and really demeaning to the position of the U.S. senator, even though I don’t know—some might argue that you can’t demean Jeff Sessions any more than he’s demeaned himself—to put that hat on at a rally.

But it told me, “This is real,” and that Jeff Sessions is there.And look at Steve Bannon, right?We need to understand who he is.He is Breitbart.I knew that at that particular moment, Breitbart was so anti-immigrant that they would take my speeches literally on the House floor and publish them.You would say: “Well, Luis, that should be a good thing.You’ve got a media source.”No, so that they could use it to whip up their audience, their crowd, the Trump crowd, the Sessions crowd.

So this is who he now has.Anybody who’s read Breitbart knows that the way it starts is that you get FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] or some other multimillion-dollar-funded anti-immigrant think tank, right—you can’t really call them that, but xenophobic, anti-immigrant group in Washington, D.C. They have a press conference.It’s an anti-immigrant study.It’s a study about immigrants and how they’re causing crime.Breitbart shows up; they publish it on Breitbart.Roger Ailes takes that, puts it on Fox News that evening, and every now and then they get a bite from others.And now he’s there in this campaign.

So once I saw Jeff Sessions, and once I saw that and I saw Stephen Miller, who is a framer, right, of the debate, is a wordsmith of the debate and how to create fear and loathing of immigrants, I said, “Wow, that’s who he’s surrounded himself with.”So when he came down the escalator and gave the speech, that was one thing.Then he surrounded himself with people who can weaponize what he was saying, and I knew there was a real danger coming forward.

Who could weaponize, but also who could push him a certain direction, right?So he’s the vehicle for them in some way.So on election night, you’re watching.It goes all the way, the campaign we’ve been talking about.You’ve worked on immigration for 25-plus years by this point.What are you thinking that night?

Well, I’ll tell you, I left.I was in Ohio most of the day.So I got back to Chicago, and I went, and there were—the mayor was there, all kinds of top elected officials.And Hillary [Clinton] was winning in Pennsylvania and Florida.I remember states he was winning.It wasn’t 8:00 central standard time yet, and I said to myself: “Oh, I want to go share this moment of triumph with my children and my wife.I want to go home.I don’t want to really be here.”By the time I got home and jumped into bed with the remote control in my hand, right, my wife, we’re laying down in bed, and we’re watching the results, it was just—Cantor was nothing compared to this.It was nothing compared to this, because this was going to be our road forward.The Democrats had spoken about immigrants, had raised the issue of immigrants, …and the party was with immigrants.If we could elect her president, wow, think of all of the amazing things we could do to protect immigrants, all of the amazing things we could do to protect immigrants.So it was a terrible night for America; it was a terrible night for women; it was a terrible night for Muslims; it was a terrible night for those who believe in Mother Earth.But it was a terrible night for immigrants because this man had won the presidency of the United States on the basis that people like my mom and dad came here to breed.And I hope everybody looks up that word in the dictionary, because that’s what they called people like my mom and dad and others who had come to this country—“breeders”—and that we were all criminals.

And all of the work that we had done since I was born—I was 60 now.I mean, America had changed and been so transformed and such a more inviting country and a fair country and a country in which there was more justice.There was always work to be done, and I just saw the clock.And I still remember when he was appointed attorney general, and I went, and I said: “Jeff Sessions?He wants women back in the kitchen.He wants gay people back in the closet.He wants black people on the back of the bus.”

And I remember the reaction was, “Oh, Luis, you’re being—you’re being so unfair.”“Really?So unfair?Well, we’ll see with “zero tolerance” and his zero tolerance policies and whether I was unfair and diminishing of voting rights in this country and the attack against Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights.I was wrong?Going and attacking and saying that, after Obama had said, “OK, the transgender community can serve freely in the military,” saying they could no longer—these things were all happening.

The Trump Transition

Let me ask you about an early moment.When you’re talking to John Kelly early in the administration—we talked to Sen. Durbin who at one point said Kelly was someone who gave the impression at the beginning that he could be trusted; he was going to be a friend to the Dreamers.What was your impression of Kelly early on?

Two things.If you’re going to be a chief of staff to the president of the United States and you’re going to be an advocate for immigrants, and Stephen Miller is in the room next door to where you’re operating, you’d better know your policy, because he will undermine you easily.And the general was just not equipped on a policy level.His heart was in the right place, but you have to have the mind and the heart equally in the right place if you’re going to win.

So in the beginning he was: “I’m not going to let this happen to the Dreamers.I’m going to work to protect them.”On TPS [Temporary Protected Status]: “I’m going to work on TPS.And this is just a question of getting the right balance.”That is to say, what do the right-wingers want if we’re going to give some justice to the immigrant community in America?

And that’s how I find him.Some ignorance and naiveté, right?Lack of knowledge about the issues as we were confronting them.So there was a real lack of knowledge on his part of the issues as we were facing them and just being kind of naïve. And that is a place where people like Stephen Miller and the anti-immigrants thrive, right?

… And so I remember that.I remember sitting down with him and discussing it.And I do remember at one point he said: “Oh, on TPS, I was the general; I was in command in Central America, and so I know people from those countries.Those are good people.”And he said to me, he said: “We’ll just get rid of the ones who don’t report every year.We’ll get rid of the ones that are on welfare.”He started—and I kept going: “You can’t be on welfare if you have Temporary Protected Status.You must report every year if you’re on—”I mean, all of the things he said we needed to make sure they were doing and kind of “We’ll get rid of the bad apples, and we’ll keep all the rest of them, which are the majority,” he didn’t have an understanding of it.

So that’s what I remember.Good intentions, but—and you know what?Gone from the White House.Gone from the White House—along with [Kirstjen] Nielsen, who he tried to protect.And as much as she carried out the ruthless, inhumane policies devised by Stephen Miller and others, and articulated by the president, it was never enough, right?So she had to be gone.So that’s kind of what I remember.

The Dreamers and DACA

… When Sessions announces the end of DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] and the deadline in that speech, there had been some attorneys’ general letters that had been brewing about the threat to sue the federal government over it.What did you make of that time period?

Well, it became clear to me that thank God that there was a judicial system in the United States of America, and we had good lawyers who were going to go to court to protect them, and that’s what we needed to do, and that we needed not to step away from immigrants but step towards them and protect them and that the American people would follow.

And indeed, that is what happened.Democrats got smart.They didn’t back away from immigration, but they got smart in terms of articulating issues.Donald Trump still thinks that he saved the Senate by being anti-immigrant.We know that the forces, the progressive forces in politics in America won because we took back the House.So I remember those things going on and mobilizing people.

So I saw that happen, and I said to myself, OK, we need to mobilize.One of the reasons I left Congress was because I felt constrained.Two things had happened.Number one, I didn’t need to be in Congress anymore.There were dozens of people ready to fill my role in the Congress of the United States.They were young, articulate, fresh, full of energy and really committed to the immigrant cause.So you don’t need to be there in that function anymore.

We had just gone through an election in which Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, we saw what happened in 2013.I said: “You know what?Immigration is set politically.We need to go out in the field and do more work in the field.I need to go back to Puerto Rico.I need to be there so that we can rebuild the island.But just as importantly, I need to go around the country helping people become citizens, helping young people get registered to vote and preparing for the upcoming election of November 2020.”

So that was my response.My response was find an avenue in which to fight and broaden the scope of the battlefields, right?Not just have the one in the Congress of the United States.And so that’s what we’ve been doing.

And please understand—and I know we might get to this later on, but in case we don’t—that every year, the year after a presidential election, the number of people applying for American citizenship drops: 2017, increase, the number of people; 2018, increase, the number of people applying for American citizenship.As we speak, there are over a million people in the queue to apply for American—they’re doing everything they can, this Trump administration, to stop them from becoming immigrants.This is an attack particularly against Latinos.

And Latinos, who are the hardest to get to become American citizens, right, to take that step from green card.There are many reasons for this, right?There are many reasons.There are economic reasons; there are linguistic reasons.And there are many reasons for this.They’re coming forward like never before to become American citizens.

And so understand that these things are going on with the Latino community.So the Latino community, obviously, sees it as an attack not just on—because you would say to yourself: “Well, I’m a green card holder.I’m legally in this country.I don’t have anything to fear.He’s talking about the undocumented, the murderers, the rapists, the killers.I’m none of those.”They know better, and they see what’s happened.

And the other thing is, we see it as an attack against our community because, one, when there’s a marriage in our community, I remember when it was a big deal if it was like a Mexican and a Puerto Rican getting married.It was like a big deal, right?It was like, “Oh, that doesn’t happen.”But that’s not really the deal.It’s those that have papers and those that don’t have papers, right?

And how it is, we’re really all one community, right, whether you have them or not.And I love all of the intermarriage that is going on, right, because it’s bringing people forward.I look at particularly the Puerto Rican community, which are citizens of the United States, and I see how vocal they are and how they come to the marches and how pro-immigrant they are and how they feel this is an attack against them.They get it, that this is an attack against them.

And so it really is—there really is a resistance that is growing and that is showing itself in real terms of getting ready for the November 2020 election.

So let me ask you about a meeting at the White House.This is Jan. 9 of 2018.So this is a meeting that’s televised on CNN.It’s the bipartisan group that’s going to the Hill to talk about the DREAM Act.Are you watching it?

Yeah.And here was an opportunity, the president’s signature, one of his signature issues: “I want to build a wall.”They’re ready to give him $25, $30 billion to build his wall.Does he take the money and declare a victory?No, because he has to let the Dreamers go.He has to give them freedom.He can no longer use them as a punching bag, right?He can no longer … threaten their freedom to be Americans.He can no longer do that.

Understand that the president of the United States, they’re building another wall, right, a wall that is just going to hurt so many more people, and it’s going to have such a bigger, devastating effect than any physical wall that you can build.They want to destroy the Dreamers and their ability to be here.They want to go to court, and they want to make them undocumented so they can deport them.

In that meeting it was discussed what were we going to do with those that have Temporary Protected Status from Haiti, from Central America, from African countries.We want to take away their legal standing in the United States so we can deport them.

In that meeting it was discussed: “Well, don’t we have to get rid of certain immigrants that come here to this country because their brother invited them to get a green card to come to the country?We have to stop that, right?”Family unity, they want to eliminate that.They want to destroy the legal immigration system as we know it, and they want to stop people who are currently in line, who tend to be brown and black and poor and not from Europe that are in line and stopping them from achieving it.

And so it was clear to me what—he called them people from “shithole countries.”I mean, this is the impact of the Stephen Millers there at the White House, right?And a president that many say is manipulated by Stephen Miller, I think he has his own—his own racist heart, to put it that way, and it’s very easy for Miller and the others to get him to do what they want to do.

Zero Tolerance and Family Separation

Let’s jump to zero tolerance and the announcement by Sessions of the program.Can you help us understand what it is, what’s different about this policy?They say, of course, that the policy is old, it’s on the books, and it’s only the enforcement that’s changing.

Look, did Bush and Obama use it from time to time; that is, saying that someone that crossed the border will be charged criminally with illegal entry into the United States, which is a criminal offense and not something dealt with the civil courts, the immigration courts?Yes, they did, but not blanket.So what they did in zero tolerance was say, “Regardless of why you crossed that border, we’re going to charge you criminally.”And therefore, if you had a legitimate asylum claim, it was going to be denied because you were now a criminal, and you were going to be rapidly deported from the United States of America.

Understand, America, that what they did was pack a room with 70, 80, 100 people at a time.They would go by all of their names.They would say, “We hope you all understand what’s going on,” when we knew they didn’t understand what was going on without really any legal counsel.And in a morning, they would deport 100 people and convict them.In other words, they were called to court; they were tried and sentenced in half a day.

And you’re talking tens of thousands of people.This was massive court appearances of tens of thousands of people.And this is the way they did it, thereby denying them their right, right, to apply for asylum, to apply through other areas which they might have an avenue, an asylum claim or an immigration claim, and simply deport them.

But it also made them criminals.Here’s the thing that I think broke America’s heart, because you saw children in cages.That was the pretext that they used for separating the adults from their children and said: “Child, you will go into detention.Parent, you will be deported.”We still as of this date know that there are parents and children that have not been—and they didn’t know what they were doing.They weren’t even keeping tabs on where these children and who their parents or where their parents were at.That’s what they did.

Zero tolerance also says to me that we’re going to change.So Jeff Sessions—and he said this very clearly—he says, “I’ve got to stop them from coming to this country,” right?And here’s another thing.He said to women: “If you’re beaten by your husband, if you are raped, if you are tortured, that’s a personal matter.And therefore, I am instructing every asylum judge”—which he controls—“to deny you your asylum claim if you’re making that appeal.”In America?It’s a private matter?No, it’s a public matter of justice in America.Any woman that is brutalized is my responsibility and the responsibility of everyone else in society to protect her.But that’s what he made.

Well, of course, this is a man who voted against the Defense of Women Act, right?So what do we expect?But that’s what Jeff Sessions did.And then he went a little further, and he said, “If it’s because of gangs, ruthless, vicious, murderous gangs in Guatemala, Honduras, that’s not a claim for asylum.”How could it not be? What’s the difference between MS-13 murdering you, torturing you, putting your children to sell drugs, prostituting your daughter, and [Bashar al-]Assad murdering people in Syria?We would certainly not say there is no difference.

… That’s why I said earlier they learn to weaponize the rhetoric of Donald Trump, right?They literally put children in cages.That’s how weaponized the rhetoric of Donald Trump became.But Donald Trump needed people like Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller to understand and to know how to weaponize his rhetoric.

Let me ask you about Kirstjen Nielsen around this time.She goes out into the White House briefing room and defends the program amid the fallout.But you meet with her that summer.Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Well, when we met, …I told her: “You’re responsible for separating children.Don’t come here and talk to us and think we’re not going to challenge you on your immigration policy.You separated children.You’re responsible.”And some of my colleagues thought that wasn’t the right thing to do.But look, if you’re going to follow the dictates of Donald Trump, then you, too, have become a person that is carrying out racist, anti-immigrant policies.And especially to go after children?

And I told her: “You know, under Obama, stop saying it was the same.It wasn’t the same under Obama.”I still remember under Obama, when they were held in detention; that is, moms and dads with their children together held in detention, and the federal court said you couldn’t keep those kids more than 20 days, so you’ve got to let them go, you’ve got to let them go, Obama’s administration made the decision to let the moms and dads leave with the children.That’s a fact.That’s just a fact.

So did we have to engage the Obama administration around these issues?Yes, but there’s a different response, right?And the predecessor to Nielsen, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] chief, said, “I’d rather resign than enforce a law that separates the moms and the dads.”And we ameliorated the situation, right?We made it better.

And so I told her that.I said basically the same thing to her on the—when she came before the Judiciary Committee, once again: “You’ve got to challenge these people.You just can’t sit down and say it’s another day.It’s not another day for those children.How am I going to be an advocate for immigrants when one of the key architects of destroying the petitions of women coming to this country seeking asylum because they’re going to lose their life because they live in a society that won’t protect them?”And I think that is key to understanding this.There is no protection for that woman in Guatemala.She cannot go to the courts.There are no courts to protect her.Now, that might seem like a pretty broad assertion to make, but I don’t think it’s far from the truth.

… And so when they came here, this woman was separating them from their children?And I knew people who were not going to take—this is not the law.They said, “You had to go to a port of entry, an official port of entry if you wanted to seek asylum.”That’s not what the law says.If you’re seeking asylum and you’re fleeing, you can’t—you go to the closest Border Patrol agent and hand yourself over, and that’s what they were doing.They weren’t criminals.They were showing up to the Border Patrol agents and saying: “Take me.I’m here.I want to apply for asylum in the United States of America.”

And so I think you really need to challenge them, because otherwise you didn’t do your job.You can’t go to a rally and denounce their politics and their actions and their cruelty and their inhumanity and have them sitting a few feet from you and not challenge them personally on their cruelty and their inhumanity.To me, I wouldn’t—I just wouldn’t be true to myself.

The 2018 Midterm Elections

Let me ask you about the caravan ahead of the midterms, that topic that Stephen Miller is pushing, that conservative media is covering, that the president is picking up and tweeting about.When you hear about these droves of people, what are you seeing?

Wow.The first thing I thought was, what’s our responsibility to be with them, to help them, to help them navigate the system?I thought we should have the same response as when Donald Trump had the Muslim ban and Muslims were arriving in this country at the airport.What did we do?We went straight to the airports to say let them in.That should be our response; that we’re a nation of laws and we have laws on our books, and they need to have their day in court.

You just can’t send people back to their deaths, which is what Nielsen did, right; which is what this president did.They sent people back.And so I thought we should welcome them, and I thought we needed to be brave as a nation and not allow Donald Trump and the others—we can deal with this.

You know what I thought about?I thought about the Irish and the potato famine and how they came to this country because they were hungry, they were poor, they had nothing else, and how we had laws to stop them from coming into this country and how they were seen as a threat.They weren’t.I thought about Jews leaving Eastern Europe as Hitler and his Nazi forces, and how we denied them entry into the United States of America because we thought, well, we don’t know if they’re well-educated, if they come here if they speak English, so we stopped them from coming to this country.

I thought about those things, and I thought it was wrong then; it’s wrong today.We need to enforce the law, we need to look at history, because in the end, in terms of immigration, good always wins in the end, and it will this time, too.The Know-Nothings of the 19th century, you know, they’re little asterisks, but they were a pretty powerful group once upon a time.We beat them.America beat them.I like to say America beat them; we beat them.We are America.We beat them.

But the Trump White House using the caravans as a fear-mongering—

Sure.

Ahead of the election.

It was more of the same.It was more of the same.Sometimes your personal experiences are such that you simply see it as more of the same.So I knew we needed a vigorous response.Look, what Trump and people who want to predicate policy based on prejudice and hate, what they rely on is your silence, is that you will not protect the people that they’re using as a scapegoat; you will not give them their day in court in the court of public opinion in America and protect them.I just knew we had to protect—it’s when it’s hard that it’s necessary.When it’s hard—and yeah, that was hard.That was not easy.

But look, he used it, and what I’ve got to say is thanks to women.They ran in unprecedented numbers for public office.They took back the House of Representatives because women ran for public office.And we have a new governor of Michigan, an important state.And we see women winning city council, for state rep, for all kinds of positions across this country.And that’s a direct—no one cannot say that is not a direct reaction to Donald Trump’s election.We elect a man who is anti-woman, and women stand up.We elect a man who is anti-immigrant, and immigrants stand up.We elect a man that’s anti-Muslim, and Muslims stand up.That’s the beauty of our democracy, is that people get to stand up when they’re under attack.

Let me ask you about the midterms.… Jeff Sessions resigns shortly after.The legacy he leaves behind and the fact that Miller also remains and digs in?

Look, Miller is going to remain behind because he knows not to take credit for anything that he does, because his course of action is to get—is to make it as impossible as he can for immigrants to have a fair shake in America, and he’s done that, and he continues to do that.But I want to say something because I think this is important. This is my position on this.It used to be that when you polled whether immigration was an important issue as the voters went to go vote, like what are the issues that most—immigration would show up.

It wouldn’t be in the top tier, but it would be there, but it would usually be negative.Now, if you ask about immigration, it’s in the top tier, and it tends to be increasingly positive.That is, people see the issue of immigration as an important political issue in a positive.And the more Stephen Miller and Donald Trump condemn immigrants and use anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, the more cemented is the view that immigrants are positive for us in America.

Now, we’re going to see that in November of 2020.America is not a country that wants to see children in cages, mothers separated from their children.I mean, those crying babies, they’re real. And there wasn’t one or two.One is terrible, never should happen. Talking about thousands of them.America—that’s not the country.

And so I think as the more Donald Trump and Stephen Miller continue to be anti-immigrant and continue to forcefully espouse hatred and bigotry against immigrants, the more America is taking a second look and saying, “I don’t think so.”

Leadership Changes

… Let me ask you about the purge at DHS.Nielsen we’ve talked about.Ultimately she gets too much of the president’s ear and, in fact, is fired.You’re not surprised by that decision?

I’m not surprised by that because they’ll eat their own, right?It’s what they do.When they came up with the new regulations around the public charge, Stephen Miller’s old friend, who was in charge of USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], American citizenship, adios, bye.You weren’t quick enough in getting the regulations promulgated, right? ...

The “go back to where you came from” statement that the president makes about “the squad” [Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib]. What is that?

Wow.Here’s what I thought: “Go back where you came from.”Let me see.Your mom came here as an immigrant.Your grandpa came here as an immigrant, right?Your children have immigrant family members.Two of your three wives are immigrants to the United States.How would you like it if I told them all to go back where they came from?You’d probably say, “No, that’s not a nice thing to say,” because he likes using the word “nice.”Anything small, four-letter words to describe anything.

Look, going back where you came from is not new, and it is something that Latinos—Latinos, whether they arrived here 200 years ago or two hours ago—hear when they walk the streets of America.It is always what your opponent uses, right, to kind of have his winning moment, right, to demean you, to say, “You are not part of this. …

The 2020 Election

… Looking towards 2020, we’ve talked a little bit about it.… Help me understand where we go from here.

Clearly Democrats have taken the side of immigrants.And it’s across—I mean, even the more moderate conservative Democrats who won’t go to Medicare for all and other issues on the progressive left have adopted a very clear stance on immigration.And I’m so proud of them.And I think they’re a reflection of America and its true values.

…You want an example of what’s going to happen in November of 2020?Well, it happened in the 1990s in California with Proposition 187, right?Oh, you want to deny immigrants their right to health care and to an education?Guess what you turned California?Into the bluest of blue states in the United States of America.

That’s what you got for being anti-immigrant.And how did that happen?It didn’t solely happen because people reacted against Proposition 187, but Latinos mobilized themselves and became citizens in unprecedented numbers.

We’re smart as a community of people, and we have great—we have great informational avenues that most of America does not watch.They don’t watch Telemundo; they don’t watch Univision; they don’t listen to our radio; they don’t read our newspapers.I do, and I will tell you, it’s mobilizing.Just turn on the TV set in Spanish in America, and you will see that mobilization.

And I saw what happened in California.It’s going to happen again to a great extent across this country in November of 2020.But we’re not going to be alone.If I thought it was just us against Trump, I might be a little fearful, a little fearful of our success.But we’re not alone.Latinos today, when they march, I see them marching for immigrants; I see them marching for Planned Parenthood; I see them marching for gay rights.I mean, I see them marching for things that, I mean, that I am so proud of the community and how it’s expanded.

And conversely, I see Americans who never saw immigration as an important issue, as an issue that affected them, an issue that they thought they should give some time and consideration to, they’re giving it time and consideration, and they’re coming to the—come to the marches.Come to the next pro-immigrant march and see.Will you see Latinos there?Yes.But you’ll also see a lot of non-Hispanics.And our allies are growing and flourishing across this country.

But the history of bipartisan efforts, the politics of this?

If you want to get immigration reform and you don’t want it to be—I believe it should be bipartisan.I believe it should be bipartisan.What is the Republican Party going to be left with after November of 2020 if Donald Trump loses?… A party that’s diminishing; a party that’s based on hatred and—what’s it going to be left with?I think they’re going to have a real examination.I mean, they had one when [Mitt] Romney lost in 2012.What do you think is going to happen with this one?Because Trump was the answer to Romney, right? ...

So look, in the Senate, in the House, I believe we can pass immigration reform and that we can make it bipartisan.Is it going to be broadly bipartisan?Probably not.But a lot of things aren’t.If women had to wait for bipartisanship and black people had to wait for—if everybody had to wait for this magic bipartisanship, I wonder how much progress would be made.

Now, were there Republicans for gay rights?Yes.Were there Republicans for women’s rights?Yes.But there’s always a base of support.It’s going to come from—that’s why you have different political parties and different ideological tendencies, right?And ours is the party of immigrants.And so Democrats are going to put up 90% of the votes.They’re going to put up 90% of the votes.It’s going to be what’s going to be required if you’re going to have immigration reform in this country.

But I know that there are Republican senators and members of the House that if you put it forward will vote for it.In the Senate, you’re just going to have to get rid of the cloture vote, you know?I mean, as long as you need 60 votes to continue—I still think there is a way forward, but the first thing is the American people have to resoundingly say: “We reject these policies and these policies.We will never support a party, we will never support a candidate that espouses these policies, or supports people that espouse these policies.”

And I think that the decision is going to be made in November of 2020 how we move forward.And I know I’m not supposed to say that.I’m optimistic because I’m betting on America and Americans like me and others to coalesce and to come together….

Family Separation as Deterrence

… You hit Nielsen pretty hard in that press conference in June at the White House because she said family separation was not a policy.I just want you to get at this question about the use of it as a policy for deterrence and that Miller was selling this, and then Sessions was selling this.Just talk about that a little bit more.

OK.So they saw immigrants flee, and they saw it under Barack Obama, and they saw it again.And it was going to continue because the root causes, right, of fleeing Honduras, of fleeing Guatemala and El Salvador had gone unabated, right?The violence, the lack of any social fabric that could protect you; the government’s inability or unwillingness to protect people; the power of the gangs and this appetite for the drugs in America, which fuels the guns and the dollars in those Central American countries, none of that changes.There’s hopelessness and despair and fear that you’re going to lose your life; that your daughter’s going to be sold; that your son’s going to be put—none of that.

And so they said to themselves: “Wow, how do we deter these people from coming?We’ll jail them.We’ll separate them from their children.You want to come to America?”Because under their logic, hey, if an American goes and robs a bank and he gets separated from his children, nobody says he should be out of jail to go back with his children.They criminalized them, right?They changed the policy.

And not only they changed the policy, they used a policy to criminalize them and take them into criminal court, right?And so this was their deterrence.And their deterrence meant that you had to undermine the very laws that you, whether you’re a DHS official, whether you’re at the White House or whether you’re the president of the United States, you have to act contrary to the laws.And the laws say everybody has a right to come.It’s fleeing violence; it’s fleeing for their lives.And if they come to our border and they come, they have a right for their day in court.They didn’t want to give them their day in court.

So what do you do?You separate.You know what?It’s worked.It’s worked.There are a lot fewer people coming, and people are going to—“Oh, we’re going to have a third country.”To me, unfortunately, a lot of it has worked.And so there are going to be people who are going to face the gangs and the drug dealers and the drug cartels on their own.And that’s what she made them do.Look, we’re talking about people losing their lives.We’re talking about young girls turned to human trafficking.We’re talking about young boys being put out to sell drugs.We’re talking about human lives. …

I think you said to her in that meeting: “You don’t know how to connect these kids with their parents.You don’t have plans for that.”You pushed—

She didn’t.I said, “You don’t”—I said: “Secretary, you can’t put children back with their parents.They are—you don’t know where the parent is and where the child is, and you don’t know who’s related to who.”I said: “This is out of control.This is what you have done.”And, you know, in Washington, D.C., everybody wants to be nice; everybody wants to be diplomatic.Oh, the Republicans used to cheer me on when I used to take on Barack Obama, when I called him “deporter in chief,” when I would go away handcuffed from the White House.They thought that was great.“Luis Gutierrez is standing up for his people.”

But if I stand up to a Republican-appointed DHS official, I’m not?You know what?I’m going to stand up to both of them, and I believe that’s what America’s going to do.

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