Rep. Gutiérrez: “Just a few weeks into his campaign and Donald Trump has a bill on the floor of the House. That is better than some of the Senators he is running against.”
Washington, DC –(ENEWSPF)–July 23, 2015. Today, Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL) spoke on the House floor in opposition to H.R. 3009, a bill to take funding away from state and local police departments who have certain community policing and community trust policies regarding immigrants.
The video is here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4545727/gutierrez-floor-speech-july-22-2025
The text as prepared for delivery is below.
Rep. Gutiérrez represents the Fourth District of Illinois, is a Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is a Member of the Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, and is the Co-Chair of the Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Floor Speech in Opposition to the Donald Trump Act H.R. 3009, July 23, 2015
Just a few weeks into his campaign and Donald Trump has a bill on the floor of the House. That is better than some of the Senators he is running against.
Donald Trump announces his campaign saying Mexican immigrants are mostly murderers, drug-dealers, and rapists, and what is the response from the Republican Party.?
They don’t denounce him. They only denounce people when they go after war heroes who ran for President. I denounce Trump for that too.
Some try to distance themselves from his comments. OK.
But here we are in the House of Representatives passing a bill to jump on the Trump bandwagon, cynically exploiting a family’s tragedy in San Francisco to score political points.
I have been very clear from Day 1 – despite efforts to smear me by the hardline advocates – that the person, this Lopez-Sanchez who pulled the trigger in San Francisco should have been deported and never turned over to San Francisco.
I have no sympathy for him and I have said on this floor and I will say it again that murderers should rot in hell (http://1.usa.gov/1CrQVGy).
The breakdown by the federal government – the federal government — to deport a known criminal as they had done before or to keep him in jail was what lead to a young American woman, just about the age of my daughters to be killed.
A tragedy — and a preventable tragedy if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do.
And preventable if this Congress had done what it is supposed to do and addressed immigration years ago, as my side has been pleading.
But this Republican proposal is not a serious attempt at fixing this problem.
Instead of piecemeal measures aimed at maximizing deportations, the long overdue solution is for Congress to enact comprehensive reform that combines smart enforcement at the border and the interior, with a clear plan of reducing the size of the undocumented population in America.
We do this by having a modern visa system so people can come with visas and background checks, not with smugglers or overstaying visas and just blending in.
We do this by telling millions of people who have never committed crimes, the ones who go to work every day and are caring for their own children and sometimes other people’s children too – we ask them to come forward, admit they are here illegally, go through a criminal background check and work their way to the right side of the law.
Get the millions of immigrants inside the system and on-the-books so that they no longer need to worry about their local police working with or not working with the deportation system.
If you get millions and millions of immigrants inside the law, then the ones who are criminals and cannot qualify to get inside the law will stick out like sore thumbs in our cities. It will allow state and local police to police their communities more effectively for criminals and threats – because they are passing over people who have proven they are not criminals and not threats.
But this is very specifically the approach that the House of Representatives, and specifically the Republican majority, refuses to touch with a ten foot poll because they see demagogues like Donald Trump firing up frustrated voters and want to take the easy way out.
Source: www.gutierrez.house.gov
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