Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant crusader who designed Donald Trump’s plan for impounding remittances to force Mexico to pay for a border wall, said on Sunday that he hopes when Trump is president, immigration enforcement officers will be sent to round up undocumented immigrants participating in protests or lobbying legislators.
Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, hosts a weekly radio program on the Kansas City station KCMO. On Sunday’s program, he discussed a recent anti-Trump protest in Albuquerque that turned violent, leading to the arrests of some protesters.
A listener called in to complain that “the law does not apply to illegal aliens,” falsely implying that there had been no consequences for violent anti-Trump protesters. “They’re now getting so bold that, you know, you and I don’t have the right to hold a rally for our people … but they have the right to get off the sidewalk, go in the street, do damage and not get arrested,” the caller said.
Kobach responded that what “really annoys” him is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t just send officers into protests and start demanding people’s papers and sending undocumented participants “back to [their] home country.”
Later in the program, Kobach said that not only should ICE start checking people’s papers at protests, they should also round up and deport undocumented immigrants who show up to lobby state lawmakers on immigration issues. “I don’t think that’s going to happen until Donald Trump is president,” he said:
You know, I think the fact that ICE was absent was also wrong. This is the way that even in the Bush administration, when [inaudible] at a protest, no one would ever arrest them and say, ‘You identified yourself as not lawfully present in the United States, we’re going to go ahead and enforce the law now.’
You know, they showed up in the Kansas legislature, they do this almost every year, when we run a bill, we meaning those who believe in the rule of law, run a bill to stop giving in-state tuition to illegal aliens, illegal aliens will show up and testify. ICE never turns up and says, ‘Okay, you’re breaking the law, time to get out of here.’ You get Democrats applauding them. It’s just unbelievable. At some point, we’ve got to say, ‘Look, we take our laws seriously,’ and I don’t think that’s going to happen until Donald Trump is president.
Note: The audio in both clips in this post is very choppy, which is how it was in the original recording posted by KCMO.
