Arlen Specter: “I believe and have believed that young 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez should have been reunited with his father at the…”

“I believe and have believed that young 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez should have been reunited with his father at the earliest possible time. I believe that as a legal matter there is no real justification for any asylum proceeding to keep young Elian Gonzalez in the United States. The purpose of asylum is to protect an alien from going back to a country where he or she will be persecuted. That certainly is not the case with Elian Gonzalez. He would be adulated. Nonetheless, I believe there are some very serious issues which have arisen that the Congress ought to address, and the most prominent of those is the manner in which Elian Gonzalez was taken into custody. In my opinion, there were less intrusive ways in which that could have been accomplished.”