CBS NEWS
By Kathryn Watson
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, had a blistering message for members of his own party in a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday as he and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, pushed their bill Thursday to grant legal status and a path to citizenship for some immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
Graham and Durbin are reviving a new version of the bill, which has been introduced in previous years in the Senate, as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program faces legal challenges in court. Graham said he appreciates the Trump administration’s stated priority to prioritize deporting “bad hombres” who are in the country illegally and have committed crimes, but urged the president and fellow Republicans to treat law-abiding immigrants whose parents brought them as children “fairly.”
“The question for the Republican Party is, what do we tell these people? How do we treat them? Here’s my answer. We treat them fairly. We do not pull the rug out from under them,” Graham said, adding those immigrants, “are no more connected with a foreign country than I am.”
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See the December 2016 letter 14 mayors wrote to President-Elect Trump to support DACA.