Patsy T. Mink: “I think that this amendment is an egregious attempt to alter what has been the basic philosophy of this country, and…”

“I think that this amendment is an egregious attempt to alter what has been the basic philosophy of this country, and that is to assume the fundamental responsibility of educating our children in our public school systems by those who do not want to be in the public school systems to preserve the integrity of the private schools. But we have always felt undergirded by the Supreme Court decision that the responsibility of all of us in our communities through our local school boards, in our States, and indeed through the Congress, is to afford educational opportunity to our children. The mischief of this amendment is to say that there are some children in our society that ought not to be educated, and that if a school system does not segregate out from its population those who are not entitled to an education, it could suffer the harm of losing Federal funds, and that is a very, very difficult predicament that school systems are going to find themselves in. There is no doubt that there is an illegal immigration problem in this country, but why use the children of our country to enforce the laws that ought to be enforced by the Justice Department and by all the other law enforcement agencies that we have put this responsibility upon?”