Political Quotes

“I agree strongly with the impassioned plea by my colleague from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky), and I'm very grateful for this amendment to be brought forward by Mr. Deutch and Mr. Foster. This really is an outrage. It's an outrage to our values as Americans, and frankly it's an outrage to taxpayers. The cost of holding an immigrant overnight is $120. We have viable and proven alternatives to detention that we should be using for noncriminal aliens. Again, what we're talking about here are different folks. When we're talking about criminal aliens, I don't think there's any dispute to the extent that we have criminal aliens. At any given time, this can be approximately 40 percent of the people in detention. When I visited the ICE facility in Aurora, they keep them separate, they wear different colored jumpsuits. They're criminal aliens, and they are--however many we have that have been apprehended for a crime--subject to deportation orders. It's perfectly fair to keep them in some form of detention. But the majority, 60 percent, are noncriminal aliens. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been a tail light out. They could have been going 10 miles over the speed limit. Yet, we as taxpayers are removing noncriminal aliens from their homes, from being the breadwinner for their family, from supporting their kids and being an asset to our country and instead turning them into a liability for taxpayers to the tune of $120 a day.…”