REMEMBER WHEN SANDERS VOTED WITH REPUBLICANS AGAINST UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS? (OP ED) [View all]

[still_one]

"It goes back to traveling across Texas in 1972 to register Latino voters and to organizing the first-ever White House conference on Hispanic Children and Youth. But it is her time in the U.S. Senate, fighting hard for comprehensive immigration reform that sets her apart from Bernie Sanders. Hillary is the only candidate in this race who has always had our backs.
Six months ago, I did an interview with Larry King where I asked whether Bernie Sanders even liked immigrants or cared about Latinos and our issues. He had been silent on immigration and our other priorities and within a week or two, Sanders was talking about immigration.
He was saying all the right things, but it raised a very important question in my mind: where was Sanders when we really needed him? I have observed Sanders first in the House of Representatives and later in the Senate and I have to say, he was absent from most of the crucial immigration debates. And when he did show up, his record was troubling.
Think about 2005 and 2006, when House Republicans were devising harsher and harsher measures to deport and criminalize immigrants and had passed the Sensenbrenner Bill – the notorious HR 4437 bill – that would have deported everyone and made criminals of families, care-givers, bus drivers and priests who had contact with undocumented immigrants. Where was Sanders? He was mostly silent when we needed champions to defend our community.
And worse, at a few critical moments in 2006, he broke with Democrats and progressives and stood with the hardline anti-immigrant wing of the Republican Party."

….

"The House passed a bill that would have allowed undocumented immigrants to be detained indefinitely and curtailed avenues to fight deportation in court. The ACLU called the bill “inhumane” and the National Council of La Raza called it a “very ugly, very harmful enforcement-only approach… to criminalize the undocumented population.” And it was a bill to which Representative Bernie Sanders said “aye.”
The same year, House Republicans were playing politics on behalf of their friends in the Minutemen, the vigilantes who set up outposts at the border to hunt immigrants. Republicans even crafted a bill that played right into one of their right-wing conspiracy theories that the U.S. government was somehow guiding immigrants past the Minutemen camps in the desert.
And when Republican Representative Jack Kingston put forward an amendment restricting the Department of Homeland Security from revealing information about groups like the Minutemen – a pure fantasy driven by anti-immigrant pandering to the right-wing -- Representative Sanders took the bait, split with Latinos and progressives in Congress, and voted in favor of this absurd measure. I guess the campaign he was running for Senate in Vermont at the time was more important to him than standing up for decency and common sense when our community was on the line.
It did not get better when he got to the Senate. The next year, while Hillary was working hard to help Ted Kennedy and myself and the broad bipartisan coalition that backed comprehensive immigration reform bill, Senator Sanders voted against it six times. He even went on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN – the number one propaganda broadcast of the anti-immigration movement at the time – to proclaim how immigrants were bad for the American economy and other twisted ideas about immigrants. It was straight from the Republican anti-immigration playbook"



https://www.univision.com/noticias/opinion/sanders-voted-with-republicans