Dave Ray, the communications director of the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), spoke yesterday with Florida talk radio host Joyce Kaufman about the Trump administration’s decision to end the DACA program for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children, saying that DACA recipients are ungrateful and have no right to call the U.S. their home.
Kaufman told Ray that she was appalled that Dreamers protesting Trump’s decision are “so angry and not grateful at all for the opportunity they’ve had” in the United States.
“They’re calling our president a liar,” Ray said. “Well, I’ll tell you, if I wanted somebody to do a favor for me, which is what this would be, I sure as heck wouldn’t give a press conference and call him a big, fat liar.”
“How about a thank you?” Kaufman asked, to which Ray replied: “Yeah, how about a thank you?”
Ray echoed Rep. Steve King in saying that the home countries of DACA recipients would “greatly benefit from the talents and the brains and the knowhow of the DACA students and the DACA workers as they return to their home countries, if that is in fact how this ends up playing out.”
Ray said he doubted that a legislative version of DACA would get through Congress, but that Dreamers have no right to complain, regardless of the legislative outcome.
“President Trump gave these folks two years or more to wind down their lives and return to their home countries,” he said. “Remember, just because you move into somebody’s country illegally and call it your home doesn’t make that your home any more than if you break into somebody’s home and call that your home.”
This is just the latest callous dismissal of the concerns of DACA recipients from a FAIR spokesperson. Last month, FAIR president Dan Stein claimed that arguments that anti-immigration laws split upf families are meaningless because “the bottom line is that everybody is related to everybody else at some point.”
FAIR has been working hard to convince the Trump administration to roll back DACA, along with an extensive wish list of anti-immigration priorities.
