During a Monday morning interview on Fox News, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach asserted that DACA recipients “are not children” and made a case that “there is nothing wrong” with asking people who have lived in the United States since they were young children to “go home.”
Kobach was responding to questions about how he balances “the emotional side” of the DACA debate with his own hard-line views, and whether he’s concerned that President Trump’s plan to announce an end to DACA could separate families.
“Well, let’s remember that one of the things that the open borders side always says is, ‘Oh, they’re just children,'” Kobach said. “No… the median age is 25 of a DACA illegal alien, and they can be up to 36 years old and still be getting the amnesty, and they claim to have come in before the age of 16, so first of all they are not children.”
Kobach went on to suggest that more deportations, not less, are the appropriate response to concerns about splitting families apart.
“If we’re worried about keeping families together, then the illegal alien parents who brought them here should also be removed to the home country along with the DACA recipient alien,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with asking people to go home, and if they’ve been able to violate our laws for 10 years or more, well, congratulations, you got a huge benefit from the American taxpayer, you got the best high school education in the western hemisphere, but now it’s time to go home and if you want to get in line and try to come in legally with those hundreds of thousands of your fellow countrymen who are waiting to do it the right way.”
Along with Vice President Mike Pence, Kobach is chair of the Trump administration’s Commission on Election Integrity — a group that’s stoking fears about voter fraud with the goal of a national purge of state voting rolls. In June, Kobach said that he’s had “the honor of personally advising President Trump, both before the election and after the election, on how to reduce illegal immigration.”
While Kobach’s comments suggest he’d be happy if the program came to an end, President Trump is trying to project a more compassionate image, suggesting in a tweet that Congress should save the program.
Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2017
During another part of his interview Monday on Fox News, Kobach argued that DACA hurts American workers.
“It’s a tough job market,” he said. “Those in Congress saying the president should not get rid of DACA amnesty should remember our young U.S. citizens are having a tough time. Why would you give amnesty to one million more aliens to compete with them?”
But a number of recent studies have concluded that the U.S. economy would be negatively impacted if Trump ends DACA. Roughly 95 percent of the nearly 800,000 DACA recipients are either working or in school.