Kari Lake wants to deport 12 million immigrants, but won't say if that includes 'Dreamers'
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U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake suggested again Wednesday that children brought to this country without proper documentation should be sent back to their native countries, without making clear whether that applies to those who grew up in America.
Lake’s comments in a news conference Wednesday in Phoenix and recently on CNN have referred to an undocumented immigrant population upward of 12 million. That is a figure generally understood to include a group called “Dreamers” who were brought into the U.S. as children and have in some cases grown to adulthood in America.
It is a population that has attained a measure of sympathy even by those calling for immigration overhauls and a crackdown on the undocumented. In 2022, for example, 51% of Arizona voters supported providing in-state college tuition rates to undocumented immigrants.
A 2020 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 74% of Americans supported granting permanent legal status — a classification short of citizenship — to the Dreamers. That poll found that 54% of Republicans favored that outcome as well.
Lake, the front runner for the Republican nomination, has said multiple times including Wednesday that she wants people who came during the “Bidenvasion” to be sent “back to their homeland.”
“I’m talking about people who come across since (President Joe Biden) opened up the border on the first day of his administration,” she said. “Anybody who has come across in this Bidenvasion needs to be repatriated back to their homeland.”
Asked to clarify whether that applies to Dreamers, Lake sidestepped the matter.
“I don’t know what you want to call them. You know what, I’m a dreamer and I have big dreams for my country.”
Lake then said The Arizona Republic likes “to twist language to make people who want security for their communities look bad.”
“I have great compassion for the people coming over. Some of them are criminals though,” she continued. “And what I have real compassion for is the people who haven’t been shown any compassion and those are American people, our American children who are dreamers, our American families, our American individuals who have a dream to live the American Dream. And because of what’s happening with these 9 to 10 or 12 million, depending on which figures you believe, we don’t have access to that.”
Lake said she is concerned about unaccompanied minors brought over the border. She said that she sides with former President Donald Trump, who wants to “reunite these children with their families.”
In a Jan. 27 interview with CNN, Lake also referred to the illegal immigration figure that is often cited as including Dreamers.
“We need to sort out the 12 million people who are here,” she said. “And in order to save our homeland, we need to send them back to their homeland, and start repatriating these people back to their homeland. We can’t afford to take on all the world’s problems. We have so many problems of our own here and we’re forgetting about the American people.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake news: Senate candidate would expel 12M illegal immigrants
