Alex Padilla: Trump Has Gutted Immigration Services While Increasing Budget for its Enforcement

TRANSCRIPT:

PADILLA: "Look, if we were having a serious, substantive policy conversation, I think there is room to discuss increased funding for our immigration system, not just smarter enforcement at the border, utilizing technology, focusing on ports of entry, but also for all the people who have pending cases, whether it’s an asylum case, whether it’s anything else. There is a need for more immigration judges and hearing officers and counsel, those sorts of things. And let’s reduce the backlog. But what the Trump Administration is doing is exactly the opposite, shifting it to complete enforcement and aggressive, extreme, cruel enforcement, for that matter, while the backlogs continue to grow because they’ve shifted resources away from those services and those programs. So, happy to have a budget conversation, but let’s be smart about where we’re going to possibly invest more. But by and large, this supposedly big, beautiful bill, which is anything but, is nothing but increasing funding for law enforcement — for immigration enforcement, gutting so many other critical areas of the budget that working families across the country depend on, all to underwrite tax breaks for the most wealthy in America, including somebody like Elon Musk."