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Immigrants’ Rights

Steve King Suspects 'A Good Chunk' Of Remittances To Mexico Are 'Laundered Drug Money'

When Donald Trump suggested this week that he would make Mexico pay for a border wall by Ctrl+Click or tap to follow the link"> threatening to cut off all remittance payments (link is external) sent by American workers to family members in Mexico, he was echoing years of calls from anti-immigrant politicians like former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (link is external) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (link is external) to punish immigrants who send money to their families.

It isn’t exactly a surprise, then, that Rep. Steve King of Iowa, one of the most vocal anti-immigration advocates in Congress, seems fairly supportive of Trump’s plan despite having endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz(link is external) for president.

Newsmax host Steve Malzberg asked King(link is external) about Trump’s plan in an interview yesterday, and King said that while he was “torn between a couple of two fires” on the issue, he’d “like to see Donald Trump go a little further with this dialogue and see what we might be able to get done.”

King, who once insisted(link is external) that most people eligible for the DREAM Act have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’ve been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” said that he suspected that “a good chunk” of remittances to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America are “laundered drug money.”