In an act of civil disobedience, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) was arrested outside the White House when he joined other protesters opposed to Arizona’s controversial new immigration law. The law is set to take place midsummer and allows officers to stop individuals based on the mere fact that they might be illegal.
Gutierrez told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, “My arrest was part of a response to what I consider the immorality of our broken immigration system. We were protesting the fact that hundreds of thousands of immigrant families have been destroyed, husbands losing their wives. There are 4 million American citizen children whose parents have either been deported or under threat of deportation. It’s time to make family sacrosanct once again and to fix our immigration system.”
He added, “So I was arrested yesterday because it was time, I thought, to escalate and to elevate the level of awareness and consciousness for all those who try to reach our shores and can’t because our system is broken.”
The Congressman debated former Arizona Republican Congressman and US Senate candidate J.D. Hayworth when he called for new technology to secure Social Security cards for immigrant workers, saying he would be “willing to give a little blood and a little DNA to prove that I’m legally working in the United States of America.”
Hayworth, who supported the new Arizona law, said, “Border security is national security. It’s not just illegals coming northward from Mexico. We’ve been getting Chinese. We’ve been getting people from the Middle East. There’s a huge criminal component,”
Gutierrez agreed with Hayworth that a stronger border security is required but that the current system “doesn’t work,” but that the new Arizona law goes too far.
He said, “I’m ready to triple that border, I’m ready to put more border patrol agents there. Will people like J.D. join us in a comprehensive plan, so we can take the 12 million who are here, legalize them, make them pay taxes, know who they are, fingerprint them because I’m with J.D., I don’t like criminals.”
Hayworth, who is running against Sen. John McCain in the primary, dismissed that the law was similar to Nazi comparisons. He argued that those types of arguments are “overblown rhetoric and a deliberate distortion to move this from a question of enforcement to one of ethnicity.”
The Justice Department is in the early stages of preparing a lawsuit to block the law.
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