President Donald Trump’s reported decision to end protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought into the United States as children has proven to be remarkably controversial within the president’s own party.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, former Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw said that the Republican Party would pay a massive price if it sat by while Trump authorized the deportation of 800,000 people who were brought into the United States as children and who had lived in the country as law-abiding residents for most of their lives.
“Those in Republican leadership who have enabled his behavior by standing silent or making excuses for him deserve the reckoning that will eventually come for the GOP,” she said. “It makes me terrifically sad to be honest — sad for the party of ideas that I supported for over 30 years — even more sad for the country and the fact that we can no longer have a credible and important debate about issues that will lead to problem solving.”
Bradshaw, who was one of the authors on the GOP’s post-2012 “autopsy” that recommended a more inclusive attitude toward Hispanics within the party, also described Trump as “anti-woman, anti-Hispanic, anti-black, anti-anything that would bring the country together,” and she said that she would not consider herself a Republican as long as Trump remained the leader of the party.