Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich speaking at CPAC 2011 in Orlando, Florida, Gage Skidmore
As President Donald Trump’s immigration polling numbers deteriorate and criticism of federal agents grows — and following the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minnesota — Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for a national conversation about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, have lived in the United States for years, and are good neighbors.
Gingrich called on President Donald Trump to “open up a national dialogue,” as he told Fox Business, saying that “this is about dignity,” a quote he took from U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL).
“Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process,” he insisted.
“We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA,” Gingrich said. “Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”
“On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship,” he claimed. “So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals.”
Federal agents, he said, “may well need more training and maybe more restraint.”
But Gingrich also claimed that anyone trying to stop them from carrying out the law is “engaged in insurrection.”
According to The Hill, “a growing number of Republicans and conservative commentators are urging the White House to shift course and scale back its aggressive immigration enforcement, especially for law-abiding immigrants with roots in their communities.”
MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, The Hill added, suggested that “if you’ve been in America for a long time, if you’ve been law-abiding, if you’re an asylum-seeker, certainly if you’ve had children that have served in the military, you’re at the front of the line” to return to the U.S. if you’ve been deported.