Mazie Hirono Quotes

We the people are sick and tired of the criminalization of immigrants, sick to our hearts to see Trump's family separation policies rip families apart across our country.

My message to everyone: the next time you hear about migrant children near the border, just picture them as your own. Then think what you would want our government to do.

Immigrant rights are civil rights.

I have to say that deporting people and calling them 'bad hombres,' then kicking families out with visa violations, upsets me.

After the separation of children from families seeking to join the United States was embraced as the official policy of our government, we should ask ourselves what story we will tell. President Trump's story is one of cruelty - that we may do something unfathomable to deter families from coming to America.

Our immigration system is fundamentally broken, and ICE's role in supporting the existing system - including separating families seeking refuge in the United States and conducting indiscriminate deportation raids in our communities - is creating an atmosphere of toxic fear and mistrust in immigrant communities.

The inhumane treatment of families turned an immigration issue into an immigration crisis.

That migrant families might be menaced or threatened in any way, shape or form when they arrive at our border - often times after an unimaginably arduous journey - is completely unacceptable.

We must make immigration a legal, orderly process to eliminate this issue, not further criminalize it.

The recent, single-year influx of unaccompanied minors from foreign countries into the United States is a direct result of President Obama's policies of encouraging amnesty and failing to enforce existing immigration laws.

We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can't feel safe in their community. It's wrong! It's wrong!

Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.

“Illegal” should describe only an action, not a person.

At almost every step of modern immigration policy and immigration politics, we have exacerbated underlying problems and made things worse.

Immigration policy should be set and enforced federally.

It's great that Trump has engendered a heated debate over illegal immigration and our open borders.

There will be no use of military forces in immigration. There will be no - repeat, no - mass deportations.

The only way that we can disincentivize Central American immigrants from illegally entering our country is if we change our policies, tweak our laws, cut the bureaucratic red tape and immediately send them back to their countries of origin. Until then, this self-imposed crisis will continue to worsen.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force?

In 2019 folks were coming across the border and were sitting down, they were sitting down waiting for Border Patrol to come up because they knew they would be released within a matter of hours if not days into the interior of the U.S. and that was the goal.

Thousands of children entering the country illegally have become the face of the immigration crisis in the U.S.

I would not invest in a Trump hate wall. We don't need to be protected from immigrants that are coming here seeking asylum and refuge.

We have to stop illegal immigration in order to ensure security in Europe.

Because of a massive backlog of asylum cases and an inability to quickly adjudicate and enforce them, more migrants are making the journey to our border.

People are realizing if they jump across our border and they have a child with them they can raise their hand and claim asylum and they will be caught and released into the homeland.