DREAMers Confront Boehner’s During Breakfast… Again (VIDEO)

Mar 13, 2014
2:06 PM

After the GOP failed last night with the ENFORCE Act, some DREAMers decided to pay another breakfast visit to House Speaker John Boehner again at a DC diner this morning.

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Here is the transcript:

Veronica: “Speaker Boehner, I just want to ask you why you want to break the dream of the dreamers, of the students. Can you please express your opinion about that? One second. Just one second. I really want to know why you have broken the dream of the DREAMERS”

Speaker Boehner: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that is not very nice.”

Boehner bodyguard: “This is not the time or the place”

Veronica: “Believe me, I have done all the things.”

Speaker Boehner: “Alright”

Speaker Boehner: “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

Veronica: “You are a father, he is a father, I am a Mom. You’re not going to answer my question? Why are you not going to answer my question? Why do you refuse to talk about that? I want all the things possible.”

Here is additional context about the exchange:

WASHINGTON — Following last night’s vote to deport hundreds of thousands of young dreamers by precluding the administration from implementing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Veronica Zavaleta, with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, FIRM member, asked Speaker John Boehner a simple question this morning: Why do you want to deport Dreamers?

Veronica’s son is a dreamer and a DACA recipient who is working for his college degree. But if House Republicans had their way, her son would be deported.

“With Speaker Boehner leading his caucus to a vote to deport hundreds of thousands of dreamers and separate them from their families last night, I just tried to ask him why,” Zavaleta said after the encounter. “Speaker Boehner is a father, and I am horrified that he would support legislation that takes our children from us. Instead of yielding control to the far-right wing, Speaker Boehner should vote to keep families together and pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

Kica Matos, of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, (FIRM) the nation’s largest immigrant-rights coalition, added: “Speaker Boehner may have felt uncomfortable during breakfast, but he is putting millions of families through agony by holding up immigration reform and voting to separate hundreds of thousands of young dreamers from their parents. Being approached during breakfast is not unfair. Losing your family is unfair.”

This wasn’t the first time Boehner has been confronted by activists.