House Speaker Ryan: Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plan Wouldn’t Pass Congress

Nov 13, 2015
11:20 AM

In an interview with 60 Minutes, the new Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, says Donald Trump’s plan to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States would never pass his chamber of Congress:

Host Scott Pelley: There was a time on Capitol Hill when the other guy had a bad idea, and now on Capitol Hill the other guy’s a bad guy.

Speaker Ryan: Yeah. I think that’s right. I don’t know how that got going.

Pelley: How do you heal that animosity? It’s your job now.

Ryan: Leadership by example is the way I look at it. I do have friends on the other side of the aisle. I have shown that we can negotiate and compromise without comprising principle — that people who have different ideas aren’t bad people, they just have different ideas. Somewhere in this we got into impugning people’s character and motives if we didn’t like their ideas. We got to get back to just debating ideas.

There’s reason to believe the new speaker’s talk of conciliation isn’t simply rhetoric.

Ryan was part of a handful of House Republicans who secretly worked with House Democrats, led by Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, to pass comprehensive immigration reform during the 2013 and 2014 sessions of Congress.

Still, Ryan may have already lost the trust of many potential immigration-reform allies, as during a town hall meeting in April 2013, the Wisconsin congressman used the term “anchor babies” to refer to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants.