Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) recently spoke with Martin Pengelly for an interview published Monday in the Guardian.
During the conversation, Gingrich pushed back against some of President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming officials’ more extreme rhetoric on mass deportations.
“I’d be surprised if there was a 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, who wrote about the interview and mentioned 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 ridiculous to say that someone who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as high school valedictorian, and is now a nurse or doctor should be deported.
We’re going to deport them because they don’t speak the language of the country from which their parents immigrated, and they’ve earned the right to be American?” Gingrich continued, saying:
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 if the deportations were handled incorrectly, public opinion would quickly turn against him. “Lincoln once said that with popular sentiment, anything is possible; without popular sentiment, nothing is possible.”
If you get a lot of human stories about mothers, babies, or children being deported, support for the deportation program will fall.”
Gingrich spoke with the Guardian ahead of the PBS documentary Journey to America with Newt and Callista Gingrich, which will be released on Tuesday.
PBS promoted the documentary by writing, “For generations, immigrants from all over the world have come to America in the hope of achieving the American dream.” Their stories are linked by a shared belief in the founding principles of our country.
“Journey to America: with Newt and Callista Gingrich” tells inspiring stories about immigrants who have come to the United States and excelled.
