(Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) spoke to Martin Pengelly recently for an interview published Monday by the Guardian. In the conversation, Gingrich poured cold water on some of the more extreme rhetoric coming from President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming officials on the topic of mass deportations.
“I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally. I just think there’s a very small faction of the party that’s rabid about this,” Gingrich told Pengelly, whose write-up of the interview noted two of Trump’s incoming officials who have vowed deportations at any cost:
He has chosen ultra-hardliners including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and has suggested his administration will attempt to remove children and documented people, telling NBC: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
“It’s nonsense to say somebody who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as a high school valedictorian and is currently a nurse or a doctor should be deported. We’re going to deport them and they don’t speak the language of whatever country their parents came from, and they’ve earned the right to be Americans?” Gingrich continued, adding:
I think [the Trump administration has to] to realize that there are gradations here that we’re dealing with, and try to think through, how do you both meet the long-term identity and national security interests of the country and meet the human concerns. And I think it’s a real challenge.
We are a nation of law despite some of the things that have been said and I think that if you have legal standing in the American system, it’s very difficult to deport you. On the other hand, if you have no legal standing, it’s pretty easy to deport you, right? And I’m for doing the easy first. That’s why we should give [Dreamers] legal status, as a practical matter.
Gingrich also warned Trump that the deportations could quickly cause public opinion to turn against him if handled wrongly, “Lincoln once said that with popular sentiment, anything is possible; without popular sentiment, nothing is possible. Well, you get very many human stories about mothers or babies or children being deported, then support for the deportation program will collapse.”
Gingrich spoke to the Guardian ahead of Tuesday’s release of Journey to America with Newt and Callista Gingrich, a PBS documentary. PBS promoted the documentary by writing, “For generations, immigrants from around the world have come to America with the hope of realizing the American dream. Their stories are united by the shared belief in the founding principles of our nation. “Journey to America: with Newt and Callista Gingrich” features inspiring immigrant stories from those who have come to the United States and excelled.”
