CNN "CNN Newsroom" - Transcript: Interview with former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julain Castro

Interview

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NATASHA CHEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Fred, I'm here with Secretary Castro right now. And earlier you and some other state representatives were denied entry. If you can tell us about that, they didn't want you to enter just this moment.

JULIAN CASTRO, (D) PRESIDENT CANDIDATE: Yes, we came here to the Clint facility to see if we could take a tour to look at the conditions of the hundreds of children who are here. I came with three state representatives from Texas, including the state representative who represents this area of Clint. They came out and said that we couldn't go through the facility, that we would not be given a tour.

CHEN: Right. And so I want to ask you about something President Trump said earlier. He said that, referring to the father and daughter who had drowned earlier, he said if they thought it was hard to get in, as in there were a wall, they wouldn't be coming up, so many lives would be saved. What would you say to that?

CASTRO: That this president has made a total failure, a disaster when it comes to the immigration issue. Right now he's saying that a wall would suddenly deter people from coming. Last year what they said was that if we would be cruel enough as Americans to let them separate little children from their parents, that that would deter Central American families from coming. And instead more families are coming.

The fact is, you're not going to get the deterrence that way. The only way that we're going to stem the flow of people coming is to have a 21st century Marshall Plan for Central America so that we can partner with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, so people can find safety there instead of having to come here.

The mistake the president has made is that he should have started that partnership on January 20th, 2017, as soon as he became president. He has wasted two-and-a-half years bloviating about a wall, fearmongering, scapegoating immigrants, blaming people who are just coming here out of desperation, instead of doing the work of creating those partnerships. If he had done that back then, we would have stemmed the flow already. If I'm elected president, the first thing that I'll do is reach out to those countries so that people can find more safety and opportunity there.

CHEN: I want to ask about deterrence, actually, because in the debate earlier this week and again today you mentioned wanting to repeal section 1325, which decriminalizes crossing the border between ports of entry. Would that not encourage more people to come through illegally if they knew that there would not be a misdemeanor charge?

CASTRO: Not at all. In fact, that's the way that we used to treat these things from 1929 until about 2004. They were treated as a civil matter. Even though we had section 1325 on the books, starting in the late '20s they were treated as a civil, not a criminal matter. And in fact, if you go back 20 years into the '90s, we actually had more people coming at that time than we do now. So this has nothing to do with deterrence. The only way that you're going to address this issue is get to the root cause of the challenge.

The other thing I would say is that sometimes folks say, well, isn't this open borders. Open borders is a right wing talking point. We have 654 miles of fencing. We have thousands of personnel on the border. We have planes. We have helicopters, boats, security cameras, guns all over the border. We also have states like this state that we're in of Texas that spend an extra $800 million on border security themselves, apart from the billions that the federal government spends. Nobody's talking about open borders. What we're talking about is being able to maintain border security but to treat people with common sense and basic compassion instead of this cruelty that this administration has chosen.

CHEN: We are observing a large number of migrants come through. And that is part of the issue we're being told with the lengthy processing time, some of the conditions that are being reported. So I know you and other leaders have said this doesn't work, this is not sustainable, you want this type of facility closed. But what is the fix? With this many people coming in, how do you process everyone?

CASTRO: We need to do several things.

[14:35:00] Number one, we need to honor their asylum claims. The reason that Oscar Martinez and his daughter Valeria ended up trying to cross that river was because this administration is playing games, something called metering. Whereas people used to be allowed at a port of entry to make their claim for asylum, now they're not being allowed to. So they got desperate and tried to cross the river, and they drowned.

Sorry, a little bit of dust here.

But what we need to do is we need to make sure that instead of building facilities like this that cost so much money and these tents behind them, we need to put that money into a process of finding relatives of these children, reuniting families, or placing them with relatives that already live in the United States, or other caregivers, quickly, vetting them and then putting them in those homes, instead of putting them in facilities like this.

And we need an immigration judiciary, a court system that has more judges and more support staff, so they can get through these asylum claims more quickly and people are not waiting for years in limbo. There's so many smart and effective things that we can do to do better on this that also reflect our humanity, not only as Americans but as human beings, more than what we're doing now. It's not rocket science. But the heart of cruelty of this administration will not allow us to get to a more sensible and more humane and effective approach.

CHEN: You're here today, Beto O'Rourke is here tomorrow. Your brother and other members of Congress are here Monday. But some of these reports that we've heard about for the conditions inside were early this week. Do you feel like this influx of politicians is coming a little late and for potentially political purposes?

CASTRO: We're coming to make sure that it doesn't happen again. I served as mayor of San Antonio and then I served as secretary of housing. I know that when you put these government officials on notice, that people are watching across America, and that, including some of their bosses in Congress and others are watching, they're going to be a lot more careful about what they're doing. It also calls for the need to end this detention.

So I'm glad that people are coming here to highlight what's going on. That's the only way we're going to reach the conscience of Americans, because whether you're liberal or conservative, or people of faith, you should recognize that what's happening here is not how children should be treated. And I think highlighting that and making the American people aware of that is necessary to change things.

CHEN: I want to ask you one final thing about raids. We've been hearing from President Trump that he is still set on having ICE raids happen, he said sometime after July 4th in some of the major cities across the United States. What would you say to that, what would you tell the cities where these raids are supposed to happen?

CASTRO: I'm glad to see that some of the mayors and state officials in those places have pushed back. I'm glad to see that nonprofits have worked with immigrant communities about knowing your rights if ICE approaches them. But ultimately this president should not go forward with those raids. He's trying to terrorize these immigrant families.

I draw a straight line between stunts like that and the citizenship question that he's proposed for the U.S. Census. He wants to intimidate immigrant families and to chill them from participating in American life. I believe that we need to harness the talent and the ability of all of the people who are here and put undocumented immigrants, as long as they haven't committed a serious crime, on a pathway to citizenship.

CHEN: But do you believe that going through the deportation proceeding for people with no legal standing is actually a stunt? Some would say that that is the process they should go through.

CASTRO: Look, of course we still have deportation proceedings. But the president is obviously using this as a political stunt. And you can tell that because he announced he was going to do it and then he pulled back and said that he's not, just like he said that with 10 minutes to go until we did an air strike on Iran, that he pulled back. He creates a problem, he has political Munchausen's by proxy where he has to create chaos, create a problem, and then try and be the hero that somehow temporarily solves it. This president, he is unfit for office. In 10, 20 years, we're going to look back on this president and say, what in the hell was wrong with that guy?

CHEN: Thank you, Secretary Castro for your time and for coming to talk to us today.

CASTRO: Thank you.

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