Buzzfeed News
By Adrian Carrasquillo
December 14, 2015
One
day before the Republican field descends on Las Vegas for the last GOP
debate of the year, a group of Hispanic conservatives met privately with
campaign officials
for five different candidates, and held a press conference afterwards
targeting Ted Cruz for his immigration stance and support of Donald
Trump.
The
group, which held a similar event in Colorado before the previous
debate, where they blasted Trump and issued a warning to Cruz, met with
campaign chairman Chad Sweet
earlier in the day, peppering him with questions.
They
said Sweet surprised them all by saying that Cruz opposes any and all
forms of legalization for undocumented immigrants, and that he believes
in attrition through
enforcement — or making the lives of those in the country illegally so
hard that they go back to their native countries. That, the group said,
amounts to self-deportation, a policy supported by Mitt Romney in 2012
widely credited with hurting him with Hispanic
voters.
“We
learned today that Sen. Cruz believes in attrition through
enforcement,” Alfonso Aguilar of the American Principles Project’s
Latino Partnership and de facto leader
of the group said, adding that the Cruz camp doesn’t like to call it
self-deportation “but that’s what it is.”
Asked
to elaborate on Sweet’s comments to the Hispanic Republicans, the
campaign said Cruz’s staff reiterates the same principles that Cruz
promotes in both public and
private.
“Anyone
who truly cares about fixing illegal immigration understands that we
must secure the border and enforce the law, and that includes building a
wall that works,
strengthening e-verify, and enforcing the law — including deportation
of those who are here illegally. This is how we solve the problem,” said
spokesperson Catherine Frazier.
The group said they were troubled to learn how Cruz feels about legalization of any form, according to Sweet.
Rev.
Tony Suarez, of the The National Hispanic Christian Leadership
Conference (NHCLC), spoke by phone with his group’s leader Samuel
Rodriguez before the event who told
him he could speak freely about the group’s disappointment.
Like
Aguilar he noted that conservatives have a lot to be proud of from the
current crop of candidates — like their diversity — and he lauded Cruz
for being a friend to
evangelicals and on the side of religious liberty, Israel, and life.
But he called for clarity from the Cruz campaign on what it means by “no
legalization.”
“To us it’s an issue of life, from the womb to the tomb,” he said.
Mario
Lopez of the Hispanic Leadership Fund spoke next, calling
self-deportation a proven political loser (“You can ask President Mitt
Romney”) and the group issued a
dire warning to Cruz about his closeness to Trump both publicly and in
private.
In
the meeting with Sweet, one attendee told him the Cruz immigration plan
uses information from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a
population control group they
say is discredited.
The
Cruz plan cites a 2009 CIS study linking immigration to unemployment,
which the group feels is another connection to Trump’s misinformation on
immigration.
While
the group is waiting for follow-ups from the Cruz campaign, they have
now issued a warning and criticism of the steadily rising conservative
firebrand.
Asked
where they can go from here if the campaign does not heed their
feedback, the group reiterated a plan mentioned to BuzzFeed News last
month, that Cruz in the general
election may not benefit from them doing the “hard work” of acting as
his surrogates on Spanish-language networks like Univision and
Telemundo.
Of
the Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul campaigns, which
also met with the group, Rosario Marin, former U.S. treasurer under
George W. Bush, said, “Good
people came to us, we have good choices,” whom she would be happy to be
a surrogate for. “But I’m troubled by the Cruz campaign’s comments,”
she said. “This development has given us a certain pause to find out
what he’s saying.”
The
group also said they wanted to forcefully condemn Hillary Clinton and
Democrats for saying all Republican candidates agree with Trump.
“It’s
the worst kind of political pandering, it’s insulting to the Latino
community and it won’t work,” Aguilar said, framing Clinton’s embrace of
going further than Obama
on executive actions as a rejection of forging consensus with House
Republicans.
“My
interpretation is that their strategy does not include a reasonable
conservative strategy on immigration,” said Artemio Muniz with the
Federation of Hispanic Republicans,
noting that Sweet waved away the group’s concerns by saying they have
PhDs doing the research and analytics for the campaign.
Which led Muniz to go further.
“I don’t think Hispanic outreach for the general is in their strategy at all,” he said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment