Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries nodded repeatedly and signaled that a Democrat-controlled Congress would reverse the Trump administration’s third-country deportations when asked about it at a Florida campaign event with congressional candidate Eliott Rodriguez.
The exchange took place earlier this month at a press conference at CAO Bakery & Cafe in Pinecrest, where Jeffries campaigned for Rodriguez in Florida’s 27th Congressional District.
A reporter asked whether “a new Congress under your new leadership will bring back people who have been deported to third countries like Africa” and referenced families seeking the return of relatives.
Jeffries responded by thanking the reporter, stating that “we need dramatic change in terms of the extreme immigration enforcement policies that have been inhumanely unleashed on the American people and hardworking immigrant families,” and emphasizing that House Democrats have “continue[d] to make clear that Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine does not get a dime.”
He added that “there’s a lot of repair work that is going to have to be done to correct the injustices that have been inflicted on the American people and on law-abiding immigrant families and we’ll prepare to do that work.”
Jeffries also said that immigration enforcement “should be fair, it should be just, it should be humane” and consistent with the country’s identity as “a nation of hard-working immigrants.”
