Diane Guerrero Quotes

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

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

Today, thousands of immigrant families are living in fear and being torn apart because Congress refuses to act.

It chills my soul to think of American children behind barbed wire.

Every day, children who are U.S. citizens are separated from their families as a result of immigration policies that need fixing.

Since when is it good to separate a family?

There are women crossing the border, finding border control agents to turn themselves in so they can begin the process of asylum, only to have their children taken from them with no idea of where they're going or when they'll see them again.

I would expect illegal alien parents to take care of their children. If it means the kids go back home with them, that's what happens. If it means there are legal relatives in the United States that can take care of them, that can happen to. But I believe it's the parents responsibility to take care of the kids.

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.

Americans are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal immigrants entering this country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by our citizens or legal immigrants, and the public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal aliens who try to take American jobs, and by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

I don't want, under any circumstances, to see in 'Haaretz' a picture of a woman with a baby in her arms crying while policemen deport her.

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

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.

Under the Obama administration, 80-90 percent of individuals making asylum claims with children were released after being processed and given a court date. Inevitably, they started living in the U.S. illegally for years to come. This is the policy the Trump administration is trying to change.

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.

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

Our friends, neighbors, and their families have been forced to live in the shadows out of fear of being torn from their families and deported from what is, for many of them, the only country they have ever known.

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.

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.

While awaiting deportation proceedings, my parents remained in detention near Boston, so I could visit them. They would have liked to fight deportation, but without a lawyer and an immigration system that rarely gives judges the discretion to allow families to stay together, they never had a chance.

President Trump is enforcing U.S. immigration law, and in doing so, protecting the well-being and in some cases the lives of U.S. citizens.

My real story is this: I am the citizen daughter of immigrant parents who were deported when I was 14. My older brother was also deported.

We need deportation centres.

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.

You can't undo a deportation.