At Center for American Progress, Cortez Masto Condemns Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda, Shares Vision for the Future

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FTP for TV stations of her remarks is available here.

Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) gave the keynote address at the Center for American Progress for their immigration event, The Cruelty Must End: Better Immigration Policies for a Stronger America. In her remarks, she condemned Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda and attacks on immigrant communities while charting her vision for the future of immigration policy.

The cornerstone of this vision is the Fairness for Immigrant Families Act, a set of commonsense proposals aimed at fixing America's broken immigration system and setting up a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have spent decades living in and contributing to this country. This legislation addresses the outdated laws complicating our immigration system, cracks down on notario fraud, and sets up guardrails against detention and deportation for immigrants who deserve stability, like DACA recipients and parents of U.S. citizens.

Below are her remarks as prepared for delivery:

There's no better time to talk about immigration than right now, on the heels of celebrating 250 years since America's founding. Because what's more American than coming to this country to pursue a better life?

That is the story of our nation. It always has been - from our Founding Fathers to the hundreds of millions of immigrant families across the United States today.

And that's my story too - I'm the descendant of Italian and Mexican immigrants.

The American people know this story well. Immigrants are our neighbors, they're our community leaders, they're doctors and teachers and business owners.

And despite the Trump administration's attempts to erase this story from our history, Americans don't want to see our friends and neighbors terrorized in their own communities.

You see this in the public's response to Trump's mass deportation policies. A majority of people say the administration is going too far on deportations.

But it's not enough to say the Trump administration is doing a bad job - we need to look to the future for solutions. And CAP's own polling tells us 68% of voters still support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have spent decades living in and contributing to our country.

Of course, this doesn't mean we abandon or ignore concerns about public safety. Americans are anxious about protecting their families from crime. And we know that voters are concerned about border security. That makes sense!

For decades, our communities have been asking for balanced, common-sense policies that will keep us safe and allow immigrants to come out of the shadows. But for decades, our system has not worked.

That's why we need to forge a new way forward in our approach to immigration. To accomplish that, we have to do two things:

We have to understand how we got here - that means honestly looking at past and present immigration policy failures

But more importantly, we have to learn from those mistakes. That means adapting and adjusting our future policies accordingly.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we thoroughly understand the failures of the Trump administration's immigration agenda.

Every day, we're hearing about masked agents without identification coming into our neighborhoods with the intention of intimidating and attacking immigrants. ICE agents are attacking peaceful protestors and killing American citizens!

DACA renewals are intentionally being delayed so federal agents can detain and deport Dreamers. Immigrant families, even those with legal status, are afraid to leave their homes and go to work.

It's horrific, and it's unacceptable. And the real-world ripple effects are hurting communities across America.

Children are being ripped from their parents. Immigrants are unable to live their lives freely. American citizens are being killed. People are losing trust in their government to keep them safe - and rightfully so.

But attacking hard-working, tax-paying immigrants is also an attack on our economy. When people are skipping work because they're afraid they'll get picked up by ICE, or when a Dreamer's DACA status lapses because of delays and they lose their work permit - that hurts our businesses, too.

Approximately 37,000 health care workers are DACA recipients. The damage that could be done to our hospitals if their work permits aren't renewed is unimaginable.

And when anyone can be stopped and detained by ICE based solely on what they look like, that erodes ALL Americans' civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have gifted DHS a $240 billion slush fund to continue their activities. I'm proud of the way my fellow Democrats and I stood against handing ICE and Border Patrol this absurd amount of money.

But now that they have it in their pockets, we need to be more clear-eyed than ever about the harm this Administration's policies are doing to our country.

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller's extreme immigration policies are un-American, and they do not work for our families.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the Biden administration did not handle immigration policy well, either.

We know there's no comparison to what President Trump is doing now, but if we want to solve our problems moving forward, we have to accept that reality.

The Biden administration placed too little emphasis on border security and too much emphasis on supporting the newly arriving asylum seekers, instead of the immigrants who have called this country home for decades.

In the United States, 26 million people live in a household with at least one undocumented family member, including almost 4.6 million U.S. citizen children. Undocumented immigrants contributed over $37 billion in state and local taxes in 2022.

Long-term, law-abiding undocumented immigrants are woven into the fabric of our communities and are key contributors to the economy. That's especially true in my home state of Nevada, where about one in four construction workers and one in seven hospitality workers is undocumented.

At the end of the day, these are people who live across all 50 states, and they're doing everything right - they're working in our communities, they're contributing to our economy, and they're following the law.

They've earned the chance to have the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

But instead, they're trapped in the endless limbo of our immigration system with no way out. And when an unfriendly administration comes along, like this one, suddenly everything they've worked for and the lives they've built here are at risk. It's wrong.

We have to learn from our past mistakes, stop ignoring the people we should be fighting for, and pass pragmatic policy solutions that allow long-term undocumented immigrants to live freely in the country where they've built their lives.

That is exactly what I've been working toward. On Monday, I introduced legislation that would take a much-needed step in that direction.

The bill is called the Fairness for Immigrant Families Act, and it is focused on that long-term, law-abiding undocumented immigrant population.

The legislation pulls down some of the arbitrary barriers in our current immigration laws that keep people undocumented with no way of fixing their status. It protects immigrant families from fraud. And it's been updated to address the new threats we're seeing under the second Trump administration.

Let me tell you a bit about what this bill does.

It eliminates the 3- and 10-year bars to reentry that keep people undocumented, because even if they qualify for a visa, they'd have to leave the country, and their families, for years.

It reestablishes the 245(i) program that would allow undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizen family to pay a fine and adjust their status without leaving the country.

It also makes it easier for certain undocumented immigrants who are caring for family members to show that they should be able to remain in the United States through the "cancellation of removal" process.

This bill makes it more difficult to deport parents of U.S. citizen children, DACA recipients, and immigrants with pending applications.

And, thanks to the Trump administration's practice of indefinitely detaining people regardless of whether they've committed a crime, this legislation has been updated to protect these groups from indefinite detention.

The Fairness for Immigrant Families Act also cracks down on fraudulent immigration services, which we know as notario fraud, and gives their victims some grace so they can reopen their cases or withdraw them without penalty.

Finally, this bill builds trust by protecting immigrants who are victims of or witnesses to crimes from being penalized by law enforcement.

Everything I just listed - those are just the highlights of this bill. I've spent years talking with immigrants, attorneys, nonprofit service providers, and other stakeholders in the immigration community, including CAP, to ensure this bill meets the needs of this country and the people who live here.

It provides stability for the people who have worked hard for years, asking for nothing in return but their chance to pursue the American Dream.

These fixes are common sense, and they offer pragmatic solutions to our country's broken immigration system.

For decades, that is what the American public has been asking for. They want to see criminals face justice, but they also want people who have shown their commitment to our country to be able to stay here and contribute to our communities.

It's taken us too long to get it right. But now is our opportunity.

We have to learn from past mistakes and write a new chapter in our nation's story - one where we create policy that benefits the people who know and love this country, whether or not they were born here.

One where our hardworking neighbors do not have to live their lives in the shadows. And one where the American Dream is within reach for everyone who has earned it.

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