Rep. King tells Trump to not back down on deporting Dreamers
By KYLE FELDSCHER • 12/8/16 9:45 AM
Iowa Rep. Steve King said President-elect Trump needs to revoke all of President Obama's protections for people who were brought to the country illegally as children, and not back down on building a border wall.
Speaking on CNN Thursday, the GOP lawmaker said he's worried about waffling from Republican lawmakers and Trump over whether the proposed border wall needs to be an actual wall, instead of a fence or a sort of surveillance zone, and whether so-called Dreamers should stay in the country. He said a harder line is needed.
"If I listen to [Trump's] campaign promises, I would expect on his first day he would cancel all of the [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans] and [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] documents out there that President Obama unconstitutionally issued," King said, referring to executive orders issued by Obama that allowed the children of illegal immigrants, and their parents, to stay in the country and work.
Trump said in an interview with Time that Dreamers who have been in the school system and been law-abiding citizens might be allowed to stay in the country when he's president. But King said that would be against the law.
"That is the law and if he's going to change that, he's gotta come to Congress and ask us to change it," King said.
King also advocated for an even more intense wall along the southern border than Trump has so far proposed. While Trump has promised a "big, beautiful wall," King wants a system similar to the Berlin Wall that blocked off the two sides of the German capital during the Cold War.
"I'm calling upon President-elect Trump to not just settle upon a wall," King said. "Let's build a fence, a wall and then a fence so we create two no-man's lands. That way when we pick people up there, they don't have an excuse. They weren't out there picking mushrooms, they were trying to illegally enter the United States."
Trump's pick for leading the Department of Homeland Security, retired Gen. John Kelly, would be an ideal choice to lead the construction of the wall, King said.
King said Kelly is an inspiring military leader, and said Kelly will bring "law and order" to the department and would figure out how to build the wall if Trump tells him to.
"I don't know if John Kelly will figure out how to make the Mexicans pay for it, but he'll do all the rest," King said.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/re...rticle/2609156
GOP Rep: 'Some awfully bad people' among 'dreamers'
By David Wright
Updated 2:47 PM ET, Thu December 8, 2016
(CNN)Rep. Steven King struck a strident tone while discussing immigration policy on Thursday, saying "there are some awfully bad people" among the so-called "dreamers" that President Barack Obama is protecting from deportation.
"When you look at this, I think that there's been such a hard push on this. The reason they're called 'dreamers' because that's the most sympathetic term that could be apply applied to people," the Iowa Republican said in an interview on CNN's "New Day."
"Among all of these dreamers, there are some awfully bad people. And these dreamers go on up to the age of 37 or 38 or maybe older. And that's if they tell the truth."
President-elect Donald Trump has said he will terminate DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an executive action signed into law by Obama in 2012 that gives some undocumented immigrants an exemption from deportation and a renewable two-year work permit. Among the guidelines, the policy states that applicants must have come to the United States before they turned 16 years old, must have been in the States since June 15, 2007, and cannot have been convicted of certain crimes.
Pressed for an example of those "awfully bad people," King didn't offer any specifics, but pointed to his experience from trips to the border where he said he'd seen "young men" smuggling drugs.
"I've spent a fair amount of time down at the border. I've been down there and helped arrest people that are smuggling drugs in," he said. "I have watched as these packs of marijuana are on the backs of young men that are walking across the border."
"You think those drug traffickers are what are referred to as the dreamers who were brought here against their will as minors, and now go to school here and have jobs?" host Alisyn Camerota asked.
King pushed back. "Wait, wait, wait -- this definition of about 'against their will -- that's a made up term," he said.
"Did any of those little kids say I didn't want to come here? Or did any of them that came in the day before they turned 18, they qualify too, did they say I was brought here against my will? No. Some of them are walking across the border on their own, lots of them," he said.
"They know what they're doing, it's not against their will," King added. "And they came here to live in the shadows. So, if we enforce the law and they live in the shadows, that's what they came here to do."
Camerota pressed King on whether he would support allowing children under age 10, for example, to stay. "Did they come of their own free will?" she asked.
"Let's ask their parents. Will those children point to their parents, and tell us you really need to enforce the law against my parents? Because they know what they were doing when they caused me to break the law. I don't think we've thought through this very well," he answered.
King explained that "I don't want to let this go because somebody's heart got a little softer than it was before the election."
The Iowa representative -- one of the most outspoken voices on immigration in the Republican conference -- also staked out an aggressive position on Trump's proposed border wall, saying he wanted concrete wall with extensive security features covering the entire U.S.-Mexico border.
King said that proposals for a "virtual" wall based on a mixture of fencing, technology, and funding increases -- something Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) pitched to Bloomberg News -- would not be acceptable.
"I would say to my friend Dennis, that's, you know, that's news speak. When you say a wall's not a wall, then what is anything anything?" he said. "When you say a wall, you mean a wall. You want to build a fence, you say fence. You don't use it a euphemism for a virtual -- say, surveillance from hot air balloons that are floating over the border."
King called for a wall "made out of concrete. And, I'm calling upon President-elect Trump to not just settle for a wall, let's build a fence, then a wall, then a fence, so we create two no man's lands, one on either side of the wall. When we pick people up there they don't really have an excuse. They weren't out there picking mushrooms."
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politi...amers-new-day/
