Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) said Wednesday that DACA recipients’ families should be deported alongside them.
“They came in presumably with a parent or parents, and so the correct policy is for us to enforce federal law and deport the whole family to the home country,” he told CNN’s John Berman and Poppy Harlow of the nearly 800,000 undocumented young people protected by DACA, many of whom are now young adults but who came to the United States as children.
“The idea that somehow it’s wrong to ask people to go back to their home country and to come in the right way, I just fundamentally disagree with that,” he added.
President Donald Trump rescinded DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, on Tuesday, leaving its recipients at risk of deportation when their work permits expire.
On Tuesday, Kobach, the vice chair of Trump’s shady “election integrity” commission, similarly told DACA recipients to “go home and get in line.”
Many DACA recipients have since started families of their own in the United States, marrying U.S. citizens and having children who are citizens.
And applying for legal status after having admitted to immigration violations — a necessary step to receiving DACA protections in the first place — makes what is already an extremely difficult and lengthy process even more so. Some Republicans in Congress, led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), have advocated for imposing severe restrictions on even legal immigration.
In 2015, Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “we’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” after DACA is rescinded.
