'They are terrible': Lawmaker urges migrants not to 'trust' Trump's self-deportation cash
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) warned Monday afternoon on CNN that immigrants should hear alarm bells over the Trump administration's new offer to give $1,000 to unauthorized immigrants who "self-deport" to their country of origin rather than let themselves be arrested by immigration enforcement — an arrangement some legal experts have warned is a trap.
"So President Trump says his administration's latest self-deportation policy will allow some migrants a potential path back to the U.S.," said anchor Jake Tapper, playing a clip of Trump's longtime far-right immigration adviser Stephen Miller, discussing the new plan.
"A single illegal alien family, over the course of his lifetime, may cost the U.S. taxpayers over $1 million," Miller said in the clip. "So when you give an illegal immigrant a check for, say, $1,000 or $2,000, whatever it may be, $3,000 to leave the country, you're saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars."
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"What do you make of this?" asked Tapper, noting that Crockett's state has a large immigrant population. "Would you advise any undocumented individual who comes to you that maybe they should take the money and go back to their home country? What's your take on it all?"
"I wouldn't trust this administration for anything," she replied. "First of all, they are terrible about paying their bills, number one. Number two, most of those people that have come over, regardless of what this administration said, they came over because they were fleeing things such as the fact that they don't have the opportunity to work and earn a living, or they're fleeing political violence. And so what is $1,000 if you're going back to a place where you may lose your life? They risked their lives, many of them, coming over here in the first place."
Beyond, that, she continued, "I want to see some numbers. Where in the heck did you just pull this number out of your back pocket, saying that they're costing us approximately ... $1 million for each undocumented person?"
"The only numbers that we have show that we receive approximately $100 billion in tax revenue from undocumented people, so much so that they decided that they want to go to the IRS and get the IRS to help them as they go and seek these people," she said. "You know why? Because they've been working and they've been doing the jobs, that now they want to roll back child labor protections and make sure that poor children are the ones that are doing those jobs, because now we're going to have those vacancies, if we're going to have jobs left at all as we continue to endure the grind of this failed experiment around this tariff war."
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