Speech #CREC-2017-06-28-pt1-PgH5237_t1

GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, June is Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States, but to celebrate that, House Republicans have made this anti-immigration week in the Congress. The advocates against legal immigration have their annual talk radio festival here in D.C. this week to extol the virtues of cutting off legal immigration. Dozens of conservative talk radio hosts set up remote broadcasts here to talk about why criminalizing immigrants and turning misdemeanors into felonies is a good thing for America. They may trade stories, while broadcasting on the air, about immigrants doing horribly bad things to people in America, as if we were in a national crime spree of Brown people killing White people. The goal of talk radio hosts is to reinforce the anti-immigration fever that has gripped the Republican Party and allowed a tough- sounding game show host to take over their party. The main organization behind the gathering of talk radio hosts is FAIR, the Federation Against American Immigration Reform, which we should note is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That is the organization in Alabama most directly responsible for suing the KKK out of the mainstream. It is like D. W. Griffith might rise up from his grave to film ``Rebirth of a Nation--the Sequel'' because FAIR and its allies want to take our immigration policies back to the 1920s when the Klan marched openly in Washington and legal immigration was reduced to almost zero. They want to get rid of anyone here who is deportable or could be deportable by passing new laws to criminalize them. Now, to coincide with the talk radio anti-immigration week, Republicans are putting on a passion play of their own in the House of Representatives by bringing two anti-immigrant bills to the floor. So we have a coordinated campaign from broadcasters, lawmakers, and the anti-immigration advocates to pressure Congress into passing bills to paint immigrants as a threat to our national and community safety-- right out of the Trump playbook. The question is not whether or not these bills will pass the House-- they will pass--but whether Democrats will be tempted to vote for tough-sounding measures because they are afraid to be labeled by conservative talk radio hosts as weak on punishing the ``murdering, rapist, drug-dealing Mexicans'' they think are lurking in every alley. Of course, that is not what these bills actually do at all. Truth and talk radio do not often go together--certainly not in the era of Trump. Let's look at the two bills Republicans are bringing for a vote. One bill is H.R. 3004, named for Kate Steinle, a young woman who was shot and killed by an immigrant nearly 2 years ago in San Francisco. It happened in July, and as you may remember, I was the first person to come to the floor and give a speech denouncing Kate's killer and calling for laws that keep people like him off the streets. A week later, while talking about various immigration issues in Spanish with Telemundo, a quote was included in a story about Kate Steinle's killing. After it was aired, rightwing groups circulated it, alleging it was proof that I was insensitive to the Steinle family, when, in fact, I was not speaking about Kate Steinle at the time, and I had already spoken out specifically on Kate's death here on the floor. But what is coming to the floor this week would not have kept Kate Steinle's killer off the streets. It would have had no impact on that case whatsoever. Instead, we are voting on a bill to put other people in different circumstances in jail for longer periods of time. It is a bait-and-switch strategy: use a horrible tragedy to sell a policy that would not have prevented that death so that we put more immigrants in jail for longer periods of time and prevent them from ever living legally in the United States. The other bill, H.R. 3003, is designed to take money away from America's largest cities and counties, specifically from efforts to fight crime--yes, take money away from them. Grants that would help local police fight crime would be eliminated under this bill from 600 of the country's largest jurisdictions.