As Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger appeared as a guest on Thursday's Wolf show to react to the Supreme Court ruling against President Barack Obama's executive order helping illegal immigrants get work permits, CNN host Wolf Blitzer at one point begged of his Republican guest on whether he "feels bad for" the millions of illegals affected by the decision.
About 1:30 p.m. ET, after Rep. Kinzinger began by voicing agreement for the court ruling against President Obama, Blitzer followed up by asking his opinion on Donald Trump wanting to deport illegals, as the CNN host used the preferred liberal term of "undocumented immigrants." Blitzer:
Well, how far would you go in supporting comprehensive immigration reform, Congressman? Because we know Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, he wants to deport immediately, what, 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. He says they have to go back to their countries. The good ones, he says, they can eventually come back to the United States. He is the leader of your party right now. Where do you stand on this?
After Rep. Kinzinger, a critic of Trump, voiced disagreement with the idea of deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, tagging such an act as "inhumane," Blitzer followed up by further pressing him about feeling "bad" for illegals:
But don't you feel bad for those four million people who began to come out of the shadows, if you will, started registering, hoping to start a new life? Some of their children are American citizens, were born in the United States, were legal here, and now potentially once again they have to start fearing about this notion they could be deported, these families could be ripped apart.
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Thursday, June 23, Wolf show on CNN:
WOLF BLITZER: Your reaction to what we just heard from the President?
[REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-IL)]
BLITZER: Well, how far would you go in supporting comprehensive immigration reform, Congressman? Because we know Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, he wants to deport immediately, what, 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. He says they have to go back to their countries. The good ones, he says, they can eventually come back to the United States. He is the leader of your party right now. Where do you stand on this?
KINZINGER: Well, look, obviously I've been very clear. I don't agree with a lot of what Donald Trump says. And, in fact, I'm not supporting him right now. It's unrealistic. It's not humane to say you're just going to send out the paddy wagons and deport 11 million people. So what we need to do is recognize that they're here. And so I think that getting a pathway to legalizing them here, having them pay taxes, be productive citizens, is the answer to start, as well as border security.That's going to be essential. These are things, if we put them hand to hand together, they're an 80 percent issue with the American public. The problem is, where the breakdown happens, is when the President says he's frustrated that he's not getting what he wants through Congress, and he's going to do it by executive order. And the Supreme Court had their voice heard on that today.
BLITZER: And the Supreme Court ruled that he didn't have that authority, at least for now, he's not ruling it out down the road right now. But don't you feel bad for those four million people who began to come out of the shadows, if you will, started registering, hoping to start a new life? Some of their children are American citizens, were born in the United States, were legal here, and now potentially once again they have to start fearing about this notion they could be deported, these families could be ripped apart.
KINZINGER: Yeah, of course I feel bad for it, and that's why I've been very aggressively saying we need to do immigration reform. We need to do it in a way that we can find the solution that, you know, is going to secure the border and allow those folks to become taxpayers. But, you know, doing that through the executive order and putting both sides in their corner, frankly, I think, has done more harm than good in the long run. We were close.Now, again, I don't have a crystal ball. I can't predict whether we would have reached bipartisan immigration reform, but I will tell you, we were way farther along in achieving that until the executive order happened. And I know that there are basically people asking the administration to delay on doing that because of the fact that we were making progress. I don't have a crystal ball -- whether it would have happened or not, I don' t know. But it needs to happen. It needs to happen going forward, but within the construct of the Constitution which is, you know, the House of Representatives and the Senate's decision.
(...)
