Republican Representative Maria Salazar spoke out against President Trump’s indiscriminate deportation of immigrants—many of them in her own district—during a hearing with Treasury Secretary Jerome Powell on Tuesday.
“We agree with [what] President Trump is doing, what the administration is doing in deporting illegals, criminal illegals. We do not want Tren de Aragua, we don’t really want people who have committed any type of crime, even more if they are illegals,” Salazar said to Powell. “But we do know that unfortunately what’s happening right now after six months of Mr. President being in office, that we’re losing thousands and thousands of workers [that] the ICE leadership has called ‘collateral damage.’ And most of those people are working in three main sectors: construction, hospitality, and agriculture.… We’re talking about 50 percent of the economy.”
Salazar also asked Powell to elaborate on the impacts of these deportations on the economy. He told her plainly that while he isn’t in charge of fully assessing the impact of immigration policies, Trump’s deportations have “reduced the amount of growth in the labor force,” which in turn would slow the economy.
Salazar is right to point out that the administration is locking up and deporting people with no criminal records who contribute significantly to the economy, but Trump obviously does not care to make the same distinction. This is a sadly ironic and extremely predictable turn of events for someone who endorsed the man who is now terrorizing her constituency.
This isn’t the first time Salazar has issued a plea to Trump. In February, she told CNN that “we have to make a differentiation between the Tren de Aragua and those Venezuelans who came in through [Temporary Protected Status].” The Supreme Court last month let Trump revoke TPS for about 350,000 Venezuelans living and working legally in the country.
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