Illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain in the United States because “we have raped their lands,” a United Methodist church official told lawmakers.
“Immigrants want to stay home,” Bishop Minerva Carcano told House Judiciary subcommittee members during an immigration hearing. “They are not able to stay home because we have undermined their economies. We have raped their lands.”
Her comments came during a heated exchange with Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who went on to ask if the 250,000 people convicted of violent crimes should be deported. “Criminal elements should be removed, but that’s not what’s happening here,” she said. “This administration needs to continue to focus on reforming broken immigration laws.”
Goodlatte suggested that it is “irresponsible” for illegal immigrants to come to the United States, but Carcano countered that they needed to do so in order to prevent their children from starving.
“I would restate that most immigrants want to stay home but they can’t feed their families,” she said. “We’re talking about Central Americans? Central Americans want to come here because we have been involved in their economies in disastrous ways.”
That testimony was offered alongside two mothers who described how their children were killed by illegal immigrants, one of whom offered a rebuttal to Carcano.
“God’s the creator of boundaries, and when you have no boundaries in your own families, in your own city, in your own state, in your own country, you have chaos,” said Laura Wilkerson, whose son was killed by a classmate from Belize in 2010. “Close the border, assess what’s here, and then decide what to do. What I’m hearing from you is that we have messed up other countries’ laws and we owe them something so we’re allowing them to come here … and I just couldn’t disagree more.”
