A Democratic senator said to be considering a presidential run in 2020 said Thursday that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should be abolished.
‘I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works,’ New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said on CNN.
She complained that under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting everyone who illegally crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, ICE has become a deportation force.’
As nearly 600 people crowded into a Senate office building on Thursday to protest the administration’s immigration policy, Gillibrand sat with them. At one point, according to the Associated Press, she held a sign that read: ‘End Detentions Now.’
Gillibrand’s leftward migration from the political center of America’s immigration debate has been significant.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, said Thursday that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should be abolished
Gillibrand (2nd right), who holds the seat Hillary Clinton vacated in 2009 to become secretary of state, protested along with anti-ICE activists in the lobby of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington on Thursday
A barricade crosses railroad tracks at a protest camp adjacent to the ICE office in Portland, Oregon on Monday. The demonstrations eventually forced officials to close the facility
In 2007 as a state legislator she opposed giving driver’s licenses to ‘illegal immigrants.’ By 2009, shortly before being appointed to fill newly minted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat, she was arguing in favor of establishing English as the nation’s official language.
Shortly after arriving in Washington, Gillibrand told The New York Times that a proposal to give legal ‘amnesty’ to illegal immigrants was ‘fatally flawed.’
And she co-sponsored the SAVE Act, which would have empowered local police forces to enforce immigration laws and beefed up border patrols.
But on Thursday as questions about her ambitions swirl around Washington – and amid a new media love affair with the 28-year-old socialist New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – she courted her party’s progressives.
ICE is facing largely partisan backlash for enforcing President Trump’s zero-tolerance illegal immigration policy
‘I don’t think ICE today is working as intended,’ Gillibrand said. ‘It has become a deportation force. And I think that you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues.’
As a presidential candidate in November 2015, Trump said on MSNBC that he would use ‘a deportation force’ to ‘humanely’ crack down on illegal immigration.
The Democrats’ most progressive senators including Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have been openly hostile to ICE while being careful not to endorse a phase-out.
Kamala Harris of California, another liberal who is mulling a White House run, said five days ago that there is a need to ‘critically re-examine ICE’ and ‘probably think about starting from scratch.’
Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan introduced a bill this week that would eliminate the agency.
ICE is facing largely partisan backlash for enforcing President Trump’s zero-tolerance approach, which has resulted in the separation of more than 2,000 minors from the adults who brought them into the U.S. illegally.
Gillibrand, shown Thursday at a second protest – this one opposing Trump’s impending Supreme Court nomination – is swinging to the left as rumors swing that she’s preparing a White House run of her own
Trump signed an executive order last week directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to petition a judge for an exception to a 1997 ruling that limits where, and for how long, the Department of Health and Human Services can house them while the adults, most of whom are parents, await trials.
In a re-election fundraising email on Friday, Trump charged that ‘Democrats are willing to fight for ANYONE illegally crossing our border. But they too often refuse to fight for their own fellow American citizens.’
Gillibrand gave an interview this month with CNN anchor and fellow Dartmouth College alumnus Jake Tapper for the Ivy League school’s alumni magazine.
Asked if Trump can be defeated in 2020, she responded with one word: ‘Yes.’
But she deflected Tapper’s question about whether she was looking past of her November re-election fight to being his challenger two years later.
‘I’m entirely focused on 2018 and haven’t thought about that,’ she said.