“We are going to stand up for families in this country:” Congressman Castro Delivers Remarks on President Trump’s Immigration Executive Orders

January 23, 2025

"We are going to stand up for families in this country:" Congressman Castro Delivers Remarks on President Trump's Immigration Executive Orders

WASHINGTON - Today, Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20) delivered remarks on President Trump's recent immigration executive orders during a press conference held by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC). Castro, a current vice chair of the CHC, served his term as chair during the final two years of the first Trump administration.

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A transcript of Congressman Castro's remarks is below:

I'm Joaquin Castro. I'm proud to represent my hometown of San Antonio, Texas here in the House of Representatives - and I'd like to remind Donald Trump that the United States became the most powerful, most prosperous nation on earth, not in spite of immigrants, but because of them.

The CHC stands united in working to protect DREAMers, farm workers and families, while Republicans tear down what makes us stronger.

We're fighting for equity, opportunity, and an economy that works for everyone.

Donald Trump and Republican politicians have embarked on a campaign to radically alter American society by stripping away constitutional, legal, and civil rights, ending birthright citizenship, and pushing people into the shadows.

On the campaign trail and in his first days in office, President Trump claimed that his administration is launching mass deportation campaigns to get criminals off the street.

The vast majority of undocumented immigrants are hardworking people who pay taxes and contributed to American society, some for decades.

President Trump doesn't care about keeping Americans safe from crime. We know this because if he did, he wouldn't have released nearly 1,600 violent criminals who were involved in the January 6th attack.

Vicious, dangerous, uncontrollable attacks, some of them against police officers with flagpoles, some who smashed their way into the Capitol.

President Trump says he's shutting down our border to stop the flow of fentanyl. But he just signed a full and unconditional pardon for a man who created the largest online drug marketplace in the world.

We can't be distracted by what he says.

Look at what he does.

He says he's targeting criminals, but he just removed the restrictions that stopped ICE from conducting raids on schools, on hospitals, and in churches.

I would ask you who he believes among those kids is a criminal sitting in a first grade class?

Who are the criminals that he's going after in the Catholic Church, in the Presbyterian Church, in the nondenominational church?

Who are those criminals?

In the 20th century, mass immigration raids led to the deportation of more than a million US citizens.

People who got wrapped up in immigration enforcement because of the color of their skin, their last name, or the language that they primarily spoke.

To be specific, during these two mass deportation campaigns, the kind that he wants to model his policy after, there were between one and two million Latinos who had every right to be in the United States of America, who ended up in Mexico. That is what Donald Trump seeks to repeat.

We are going to stand up for families in this country, no matter where they are, whether they're in San Antonio, they're in Florida, Nebraska, California, Chicago, wherever they are.

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