Donald Trump “is taking credit for the Obama administration’s reported plans to step up deportations of families early next year, and claimed Saturday that ‘criminal deportations’ are at their lowest number in years,” CNN reports.
The Washington Post reported “that the nationwide raids will focus on hundreds of families that have entered the United States since early last year. The plan is the first large-scale effort to deport families that have fled violence in Central America.”
Wall Street Journal: “Throughout the Florida Republican’s career in public office, Mr. Rubio has struggled to balance the competing demands of immigrant-rights advocates and the hard-liners who oppose any attempt to legalize undocumented immigrants… In trying to navigate the competing demands of warring factions in the immigration debate, Mr. Rubio is at risk of pleasing no one, making this issue one of the single biggest impediments in his quest for the presidency.”
Sen. Ted Cruz ratcheted up his attack on Sen. Marco Rubio “by insinuating that Mr. Rubio had broken his promise to voters who elected him to fight ‘amnesty’ for undocumented immigrants,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Cruz also challenged his Republican rivals to declare their position on whether people who are in the country illegally should be granted citizenship.”
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Sen. Ted Cruz defended his role in the 2013 immigration battles, “telling reporters at a rally here that the Republican ‘establishment’ was misleading people about why he introduced an amendment to penalize workers in the United States illegally,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Cruz: “Let me use a Las Vegas analogy, from poker. It’s called ‘calling their bluff.’ Listen, the Democrats and the establishment Republicans who supported the Gang of Eight — they claimed they cared about the people who were here illegally. And so I introduced an amendment that made anyone here illegally permanently ineligible for citizenship. That amendment called their bluff, because it revealed that the members of the Gang of Eight were hypocrites.”
Sen. Ted Cruz “got a little flustered trying to defend his opposition to immigration reform,” the Huffington Post reports.
Rick Klein: “Wait – was Ted Cruz engaged in … Washington business as usual?”
First Read notes that Cruz’s performance “was shaky at best. But ask yourself what conservative voters will care about in the next six weeks: Rubio standing shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Schumer, or Cruz voting with Jeff Sessions?”
“I watched him find that sweet spot of compromise on immigration reform, but then he broke down like a cheap shotgun the minute the right started chewing on his rear end.”
— Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), quoted by Politico, on how Sen. Marco Rubio backed away from his own immigration reform proposal.
A new Bloomberg/Purple Strategies poll finds 65% of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him.
Said pollster Doug Usher: “This indicates that, despite some conventional wisdom expressed in the last 48 hours, this is unlikely to hurt Trump at least in the primary campaign.”
A new Associated Press-GfK poll finds that 54% of Americans, including about three-quarters of Republicans, about half of independents and over a third of Democrats, said the United States takes in too many immigrants from the Middle East.
By contrast, 46% of Americans, including 6 in 10 Republicans, slightly under half of independents and 3 in 10 Democrats, said the U.S. takes too many immigrants from Latin America.
Iowa state Sen. Mark Chelgren (R), who is running for Congress, told the Knoxville Journal Express that if someone “is found to have crossed into the country illegally, committed a felony while here, then been deported, he supports executing that individual if they break America’s immigration laws a second time.”
David Frum: “Until he read Ann Coulter’s book this spring, Trump seemed to have been a perfectly conventional business Republican on immigration. In a 2012 interview, in fact, he blamed Romney’s loss on taking a too-tough line on the issue”
“Attacking Donald Trump as untrustworthy on stopping illegal immigration—or having super PACs do it —will stick in the craw of elected Republicans. They are, for the most part, in full agreement with the 2012-vintage Trump on the issue. But it’s their only hope. Of course, it raises the awkward but all-important question: What would they do instead to address a voter concern that until now they have ignored or disdained?”
Hillary Clinton addressed criticism of her use of the phrase “illegal immigrants” in a Facebook chat hosted by the Spanish-language television network Telemundo, Yahoo News reports.
Said Clinton: “That was a poor choice of words. As I’ve said throughout this campaign, the people at the heart of this issue are children, parents, families, DREAMers. They have names, and hopes and dreams that deserve to be respected.”
Ben Carson said the United States should have a database on every immigrant who enters the country, “addressing comments from Donald Trump that he would not rule out creating a registry of Muslims to track for terrorist activity,” Politico reports.
At the same time, he called Trump’s call for tracking and targeting Muslims specifically as something that would be “setting a pretty dangerous precedent.”
Tennessee Rep. Glen Casasa (R) “believes the time has come for the National Guard to round up any Syrian refugees who have recently settled in the state and to stop any additional Syrian refugees from entering Tennessee,” the Tennessean reports.
Said Casasa: “I’m not worried about what a bureaucrat in D.C. or an unelected judge thinks. … We need to gather (Syrian refugees) up and politely take them back to the ICE center and say, ‘They’re not coming to Tennessee, they’re yours.’ “
“On the anniversary of President Obama’s executive actions to ease burdens on immigrants, the Service Employees International Union and iAmerica Action are releasing a ‘substantial’ national advertising campaign that targets Republicans on immigration,” the New York Times reports.
“The ads will run in Spanish on Telemundo and Univision and during the Latin Grammy Awards on Thursday. The ads will also air in Nevada, Florida, Colorado and Texas through Sunday, and English versions will run online.”
Rick Klein: “The speed with which the Paris attacks went from a national-security debate to an immigration one says more about the perceived state of today’s Republican Party than it does about today’s perceived security threats. The Republican contenders have sought to one-up themselves with letters, bills, demands, and sound bites aimed at blocking the Obama administration from allowing Syrian Muslim refugees into the United States. Half the nation’s governors – almost all of them Republicans – are threatening not to welcome them into their states, even though there’s little they can do to bar them if the federal government accepts them as refugees. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz have offered differing (and mostly non-specific, so far) proposals to make it easier for Syrian Christians to enter the US as refugees, while potentially blocking Muslims.”
“The rhetoric brought a harsh rebuttal from President Obama, who called it ‘un-American’ to impose a religious test on refugees. It does not, for now, look un-Republican in this primary season.”
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) announced he “would refuse the relocation of Syrian refugees to the state in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday,” the Birmingham News reports.
Said Bentley: “After full consideration of this weekend’s attacks of terror on innocent citizens in Paris, I will oppose any attempt to relocate Syrian refugees to Alabama through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. As your governor, I will not stand complicit to a policy that places the citizens of Alabama in harm’s way.”
New York Times: “But after arriving in Washington, Mr. Rubio committed what many of his earliest supporters considered the ultimate betrayal: He became a key architect of legislation that would have overhauled the immigration system and given 11 million people here illegally the opportunity to become citizens.”
“The business and donor class of the Republican Party heralded him for it… But as fury built on the right and conservatives blocked the legislation in the House, where it eventually died, Mr. Rubio backed away. Now, as he seeks the presidency, he is taking an even harder line, talking of the need to deport millions before there can be any real fix to the immigration system.”
Escalating a confrontation with Sen. Marco Rubio over immigration policy, Sen. Ted Cruz introduced proposals outlining his own approach, calling for a halt to increases in legal immigration “so long as American unemployment remains unacceptably high,” the New York Times reports.
Said Cruz: “If you’re supporting amnesty, you’re supporting the Obama-Clinton weakness and appeasement to radical Islamic terrorism.”
“In recent days, Mr. Cruz has reminded voters that Mr. Rubio was one of the ‘Gang of Eight’ senators from both parties who supported the immigration overhaul, which included a path to citizenship but was never enacted.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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