NBC News "Meet the Press" - Transcript:
Interview
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CHUCK TODD:
Joining me now from Brunswick, Maine, is Independent Senator Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats. Want to get a perspective from the other side of the aisle. Senator King, welcome back to Meet the Press, sir.
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Great to be with you, Chuck.
CHUCK TODD:
So let me ask -- start with the same question I asked Senator Lankford. Have we misnamed this? Is this a refugee crisis more than it is a migrant or immigration crisis?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
I think it is. I think that's exactly right. It's more of an asylum and refugee. I think it's important to make some distinctions. These are almost entirely people coming from Central America, not Mexico. Particularly Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And they are fleeing violence. And that's one of the reasons this idea of a deterrent may not work. If you're looking down the barrel of a gun in your home community, whatever your chances are to get to a free country, you're going to take it in order to save your family's lives. So that really is what we're talking about here. And this is very different from the waves of illegal immigrants coming across the border 15, 20 years ago, mostly from Mexico, simply looking for jobs. Mexican migration has diminished enormously.
CHUCK TODD:
Right, so if you believe it should be treated more as a refugee crisis, so for instance that would be sort of I guess how we handled the Cubans in the '60s, Hungarians in the '50s, Vietnamese in the '70s, how should the policy change? Does the government intervention, should it be different if it's a refugee crisis?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Well, yeah, because if you're crossing the border illegally with no claim of asylum or refugee status, then that's a crime and we have a process for deportation. People coming to claim asylum are not illegal immigrants. Under the law, they have a right to establish their claim of asylum, that they're in a legitimate fear for their life, that they're fleeing persecution in their home country. And that applies, by the way, to people coming from other parts of the world. But you have that right. And the problem is, James Lankford mentioned this, we don't have enough judges. There's a bureaucratic backlog that can take a year or two in order to get your claim adjudicated. The question then is what do you do with these people in the interim? And the administration made the terrible choice of separating children from their parents. They didn't have to do that. That wasn't required by the law. Now they're saying, "Well, we're going to keep them together, but we're going to keep them together in detention." I don't think that's a necessary choice either. There's a lot of data that there are alternatives to detention that can still ensure that people show up for their court hearing, which by the way, are a lot cheaper for the taxpayers.
CHUCK TODD:
Very quickly on this, Senator Lankford, he's leading to try to fix this Flores Amendment. You heard him outline different ways you could do that, defund it completely and make it sort of, an administration can't do it because there's no money to do it, extend it to 60 days rather than 20 days. What do you favor? I know there's a bill with Senator Feinstein, but there's no Republican support there. I assume this has to be a bipartisan deal. Is there a part of Senator Lankford's suggestions that you can support?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Well, there are a number of proposals kicking around. I was in a meeting on Wednesday at Senator Susan Collins's office. It was very interesting sitting next to Dianne Feinstein and Ted Cruz. And Ted Cruz and Dianne both have a bill. Now think of that, the opportunity to vote for a bill, the Feinstein-Cruz bill. When did you ever think that would happen? But they're talking about not separating, then talking about some alternatives. And this is where the discussion is. Does it have to be detention? And I don't like the defunding idea. That's essentially saying, you know, "The courts, we're not going to listen to you." I don't think that makes sense. But I think some additional time may be true. But I want to talk about how do we deal with these people. The other thing, Chuck, we've got to talk about, is what's going on in these countries and why is this surge coming towards us? And in fact before the program this morning, James and I were talking about going to Central America. He's been there a couple of times and trying to figure out what can we do to stabilize those regimes so people don't feel like they have to run for their lives to America.
CHUCK TODD:
I'm curious, considering what happened in 2014, when the Obama administration was tackling essentially the same surge of folks coming from Central America, the Obama administration didn't exactly welcome those folks with open arms either, the goal was -- while they didn't separate -- the goal was to get them back to their home country as quickly as possible. Was that a mistake in hindsight?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Well, I think they were overwhelmed. If you go back and read about that period, and I went with a couple of other senators to McAllen, Texas, during that period to see how these kids were being treated. The difference between then and now is three years ago, they were unaccompanied kids. What's happening this time is kids are coming with their families, with their parents, and they're being separated. And that's what I think caused this firestorm. But there clearly has to be a better way to deal with this. And I think there are alternatives to detention, more judges, more timely processing of these things. Because, you know, we're a nation of immigrants, number one, except for the African Americans who were brought here against their will, and the Native Americans. But all the rest of us are immigrants and also asylum seekers. The pilgrims were escaping religious persecution.
CHUCK TODD:
Andrew Sullivan argues this week, "Just give Trump is wall." He used more colorful language than that. And just go get something for it if you're the Democrats. Give him his wall, because then maybe there'll be more heart in the rest of these policies, the rest of this migrant crisis. Are you there yet? Give the president his wall and figure this out?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Ironically, Chuck, we did that. Mike Rounds and I had an amendment, it was the one that got the most votes on the floor of the Senate. We got 54 votes. It was in a sense DACA for the wall. And the wall was fully funded. The Democratic Caucus voted, I think, 46 out of 48 members, 49 members for it. That was a hard sell. But the White House itself torpedoed the bill. They threatened to veto, they sent out a scurrilous press release from DHS and we had the votes. We had probably 65, 67 votes. They killed it. They had the wall in their hand and they let it go because they wanted more. And the question is, they keep sort of raising the ante and saying, "You've got to limit legal immigration, you've got to change this, you've got to change that." And, you know, that's one of the problems is we never know where the goal line is.
CHUCK TODD:
I want to ask you about a movement that's growing in the Democratic side of the aisle, a hashtag #AbolishICE, referring to the enforcement agency when it comes to immigration. Listen to what your colleague Senator Kamala Harris said about the idea of abolishing ICE. Here's what she told my colleague Kasie Hunt.
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CHUCK TODD:
What do you make of that? Is ICE the bigger problem here?
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Well, I don't know how you abolish an agency without abolishing the function, and I think the function is necessary. As far as what Senator Harris said about examining what they're doing, how they're doing it, I think that's absolutely something we should do. That's our responsibility to provide oversight. But ultimately, there's going to have to be an agency. Before ICE, it was INS There has to be some agency to administer the immigration laws in the country. But taking a look at how they're doing it and how they're approaching it. The question -- we had a border patrol stop up in here in Maine a couple of weeks ago. Is that constitutional? Do we stop American citizens in the middle of a highway and ask for their papers? There are a lot of questions to be answered. I don't know if I say abolish, I don't think that makes a lot of sense. But I do think looking at it makes a hell of a lot of sense.
CHUCK TODD:
Alright. Senator Angus King, I'm going to leave it there, the Independent senator from Maine who of course caucuses with the Democrats. Thanks for coming on and sharing your views, sir.
SENATOR ANGUS KING:
Thanks, Chuck.
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