The Moment Donald Trump and President Obama Agree on Immigration Rhetoric

Jul 1, 2015
11:49 PM

Donald Trump has had a really bad week. First, NBC. Then, Macy’s. This Buzzfeed article, too. And now, even Emmitt Smith is out.

Emmitt Flipping Smith.

The Trump fallout continues to spiral, and today, Trump (with the help of Breitbart and The Daily Caller) is now so desperate, that he is aligning himself with President Obama when it comes to immigration rhetoric. Here is what Trump’s Instagram posted:

Make our borders strong and stop illegal immigration. Even President Obama agrees-

A photo posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on

What we all can conclude from Trump’s latest statement? That he truly doesn’t get it, because if he (as well as Breitbart and TDC) really understood the U.S. Latino electorate, they would know that many Latino voters have been extremely critical of the President Obama as well, especially when he uses “gang-banger” rhetoric. But hey, we understand: Trump has had one really bad week. Time to shift the narrative. What better way to do that by agreeing with President Obama? Ok.

Psst, Mr. Trump… a lot of Latino voters have had this issue with the President for a while now. Seriously, the whole characteriztation of “felons not families” has been highly problematic (and inaccurate) the moment the White House approved the sound bite last year. And don’t get us started about family detentions.

But hey, Mr. Trump, if you need someone to tell you the truth, here goes: President Obama also falls into the same rhetoric trap as you do. This page has been calling him out on that for years, but that doesn’t mean that your June 16 comments get a pass. Nice try.

Trump is also asking that the media demand an apology from President Obama? We have actually been demanding one for a while, especially since he is the Deporter in Chief.

By the way, Breitbart and TDC won’t share the entire immigration remarks President Obama gave today in Tennessee. But we will:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. I work with Family and Children Service. I am versed in the health care system and I help people enroll in the marketplace. And I want to thank you so much on behalf of the many people I’ve been helping, especially the most vulnerable immigrant people, to get affordable health insurance. We really thank you very much.

Also, I just want to ask you if you have any plans to expand the Affordable Care Act for sick migrant people, especially the people who don’t have enough documents in this country but they still live and work here for a long time. Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we were very clear that the Affordable Care Act did not apply to people who are not here legally. And that’s the law. So that’s another example of — there’s a lot of misinformation about this. The law says that if you are undocumented, if you’re not here legally, you can’t benefit from subsidies and the program that we’ve set up.

The real answer to your question is why don’t we have immigration reform so that people who’ve been here a long time who are otherwise law-abiding citizens, who oftentimes have children who are U.S. citizens, who are contributing to the society and are willing to pay their dues, pay taxes, get a background check — why don’t we give them a pathway so they can be legal. (Applause.) If we do that — if we reform the immigration system, which is all broken, then this problem that you just mentioned takes care of itself.

I mean, look, we should not be encouraging illegal immigration. What we should be doing is setting up a smart, legal immigration system that doesn’t separate families, but does focus on making sure that people who are dangerous, people who are gang-bangers or criminals — that we’re deporting them as quickly as possible, that we’re focusing our resources there; that we’re focusing on a strong border. We’ve made improvements on all those fronts, but we could be doing even more if we had immigration reform.

And we almost got that done. We had a bipartisan bill come through the Senate that was very smart and was well-crafted. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was a good compromise among a lot of different ideas. The House of Representatives declined to call it to a vote, even though I think we had a majority of members of the House of Representatives who would be willing to vote for it.

I’ve taken some administrative actions to try to improve the system. For example, us not deporting some young person who grew up here and been here since they were three or four or five years old, brought here by their parents, hasn’t done anything wrong, are going to school with our kids, or friends with our kids, and suddenly — in some cases, they didn’t even know that they weren’t citizens — and then they’re 18 years old and suddenly they can’t get a college scholarship because it turns out they don’t have the legal documents.

And I said, administratively, that’s not who we are to just send those kids back. In some cases, they’ve never been to the country that their parents are from, don’t speak the language. What do you mean we’re going to send them back? Some of them serving in our military.

So we’ve done a lot administratively. Ultimately, though, to really find a full solution to the problem we’re going to have to get congressional action. And I suspect this will be a topic of conversation during the upcoming presidential campaign.

And here is the full video of the entire event President Obama held:

Ok, so politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to perpetuate images of the “criminal” immigrant. We just find it hilariously ironic that Trump and his media buddies are trying to say that Latinos will never call out the President for his comments. Yeah, right. That’s all we’ve been doing on this issue for the last few years.

So, Mr. Trump, thank you for telling the truth about President Obama and the White House. That still doesn’t change the fact that you screwed up, too.