Alex Padilla U.S. Senator for California

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, joined a hearing titled “How Mass Deportations Will Separate American Families, Harm Our Armed Forces, and Devastate Our Economy,” to deliver remarks and question witnesses on the dangers of the incoming Trump Administration’s mass deportation plans.

Padilla sharply criticized Donald Trump’s extremist plans, which will separate spouses and rip parents away from their U.S. citizen children, while causing massive economic hardship. He referenced the threats posed by his anti-immigrant picks, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan.

The mass deportations plan would lead to skyrocketing prices for food, goods, and services, and could drop the United States’ GDP up to 6.8 percent. Undocumented immigrants make up nearly 14 percent of all construction workers and around 42 percent of our agricultural workforce. It would also take millions of dollars to find, detain, and remove Trump’s targets for deportation, with millions more spent on hiring thousands of Border Patrol and ICE agents and building massive detention facilities for deportations.

Padilla questioned Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, on the severe economic damage of deporting undocumented agricultural workers. Reichlin-Melnick said mass deportation would crumble our food supply, emphasizing the vital work immigrant farm workers do across agricultural sectors, including crop picking, meat and poultry processing, and dairy production. Padilla also stressed the importance of our immigrant construction workers, health care workers, students, and innovators to keep our country moving.

Additionally, Padilla called on his colleagues to pass his Citizenship for Essential Workers Act, which would create an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million immigrant workers deemed essential by the previous Trump Administration, who kept Americans healthy, fed, and safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key Excerpts:

• This hearing is on the eve of the next Donald Trump Administration, and we’ve heard him for months and months and months now, throughout the campaign trail, promise mass deportations. We heard him over and over again commit to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” … We’ve even heard Donald Trump say that there will be “no price tag” for deportations and heard him promise on Truth Social to use the United States military to execute it.

• We’ve seen Donald Trump in the past and how he operates. Do you remember the Muslim bans he imposed early in his first term and the family separations at the border that we witnessed for years? So I’ve seen enough to know that while he may plan to prioritize, in effect, he will be targeting all undocumented immigrants, which will inevitably include those without criminal convictions of any type.

• For anybody whose vote this last November was motivated by high prices of food, of housing, of anything else, understand that the mass deportation Donald Trump is describing will be disastrous to our economy. … It is all of us, the American people, who will pay for the extremism policies that he has promised.

• So the next time we hear Republicans say that they support Trump’s plan to deport waves, waves of undocumented immigrants, let’s be clear about what comes with that: higher prices for American families. They’re supporting the forced removal of millions of hardworking community members, 80 percent of whom have lived here 10 years or more. These are not recent arrivals — people who have lived here for years, if not decades. They’re supporting fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities that will cause untold numbers of immigrants, no matter their status, to stay home from work, from school, from shopping.

• And they’re supporting the punishment of over 5 million workers who Donald Trump’s own administration declared to be “essential” to our economy. Essential workers who fed us and kept us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. So if you agree with the spirit of at least that segment deserves better, then colleagues join me in supporting the Citizenship for Essential Workers Act, the essential workers that the Trump Administration deemed critical to our nation’s economy and security. Let’s provide them with some legal status upfront and a pathway to earn citizenship because we need them.

• We don’t need the massive deportations that the political rhetoric of the campaign cycle has brought us, and we certainly don’t need the uncertainty, the fear, and the loss that we’ll feel for years to come.

Video footage of Senator Padilla’s full remarks is available here.

Senator Padilla is a leading voice in Congress for immigration reform. Last week, Padilla, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), and Senator Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) called on President Biden to take urgent actions to protect long-term immigrant communities before the end of his term. Throughout the year, Padilla has called on the Biden Administration to protect long-term undocumented residents and ease certain DACA recipients’ ability to be employed in the United States. Additionally, Padilla convened a Senate Budget Committee hearing alongside Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) titled “Unlocking America’s Potential: How Immigration Fuels Economic Growth and Our Competitive Advantage.”

Padilla continues to fight relentlessly to expand pathways to citizenship for millions of long-term U.S. residents. His bill, the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929, would update the existing Registry statute so that an immigrant may be eligible to apply for lawful permanent resident status if they meet certain conditions, providing a much-needed pathway to a green card for more than 8 million people, including Dreamers, TPS holders, children of long-term visa holders, essential workers, and highly skilled members of our workforce. He previously introduced the Citizenship for Essential Workers Act, which would create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented essential workers, including Dreamers, as his first bill in Congress.

More information about the hearing is available here.

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