On Thursday, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL), who is leaving Congress at the start of 2019, went out swinging during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, where he questioned the policies from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen and the Trump administration.
Just watch.
Here are the prepared remarks from Gutiérrez:
Secretary Nielsen,
The Majority on this Committee must think you are doing a fantastic job, because they ordered this hearing just so the secretary could come before us and look tough and remorseless just in time for the holidays. I suspect that if you still have your job in about three weeks and you are called before the House Judiciary Committee, you’ll really look forward to their sympathetic questions.
I want to start by praising this Administration and your role in it. There is really one thing this Administration has done better than any other Administration in American history, and that is: lie.
- Day 1: President sent the former Press Secretary out say his inauguration crowd was the biggest in American history, and the American people laughed at him because the evidence was plain to see.
- President’s own remarks on the world stage before the UN General Assembly when he said he had accomplished more in his time as President than anyone ever – and the World laughed at him because the evidence is plain to see.
But specifically in the area of Homeland Security, lying has been elevated to a new and astounding level of mendacity.
- President Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy by saying that Mexico was “sending” us the worst of the worst who were mostly rapists and murderers…
- Trump saying he was “required” to break up migrant families because of “bad laws that the Democrats gave us.”
- The one about Mexico paying for a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf;
- All of the ones about the massive invasion via migrant caravan that would ruin America;
- When Trump said there were “good people” among the Nazis and White Supremacists demonstrating in Charlottesville who killed and injured counter demonstrators….
That time, nobody was laughing, but the evidence was plain to see that these are gigantic lies.
CHC/Kelly
- The former Secretary of Homeland Security dropped a few whoppers himself, the most memorable for me is when he sat with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the Capitol… in a room full of Hispanic Members of Congress, many of whose parents or grandparents were immigrants and didn’t speak English when they arrived.
He looked us in the eye and said the reason we cannot have too many poor uneducated Latinos in America is because they will never assimilate into American culture like previous waves of immigrants, like the Irish, or Italians, or Norwegians did.
Secretary Kelly told a room full of Hispanic Congressmen and women that poor uneducated Latinos, a lot like my parents from the mountains of Puerto Rico, would never fit in or someday, send their children to Congress as equal partners in this Democracy.
It is as if you cannot see the reality of modern immigration or the contributions of anyone who came from countries other than Norway or other parts of Europe. It is as is you and the Trump Administration are blind , and agree with Tucker Carlson that immigrants bring danger and dirt.
But I have to say, the all-time record for lying in the face of all evidence, was a tweet you sent out on June 17 of this year.
“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”
***
After Gutiérrez’s remarks, Nielsen insisted that DHS was not lying at all.
Ok.
