On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) reacted to ICE detaining some Iranian nationals by saying that “I don’t know the specifics of every single case, but what I can tell you is I don’t trust this administration to be going after real criminals, across the board, whether or not they are Iranian or not. They want to justify their policies and the additional funding” “And so, the fact of the matter is, they’re going to go after folks.”
Host Audie Cornish said, “ICE has arrested more than 130 Iranian nationals, just in one week. That’s double, like, the whole year’s amount of arrests before. And the acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, actually told Fox News that they’re targeting high-risk — high-threat countries that want to do harm to the U.S. So, they are kind of rounding up people who may have military service — served in Iran, where it’s mandatory, frankly.”
She then played video of Lyons saying, “ICE is at the forefront of making sure that we’re rounding up all these individuals, or attempting to locate the ones that did get in. You did see that list of individuals that were arrested. You have one there with admitted ties to Hezbollah. We also arrested a former sniper from a hostile country who snuck into the United States. So, those are the type of individuals we want to locate before they can do anything here.”
Cornish then asked, “Now we’re hearing the term sleeper cells. How do you think about all this? I know — I believe your family is from Iran. Can you talk about this targeting?”
Ansari responded, “So, on top of the atrocious way that Donald Trump handled the foreign policy aspect and the fact that he almost got us into a massive war in the Middle East, another consequence of what just happened over the last couple of weeks with Iran is how Iranian Americans are now being treated and going to be treated in the United States. There are about 1 million Iranians in the United States, total. They’ve been here — many have been here for decades. We know — I have already gotten dozens of calls about folks who have been arrested or who are being detained. I don’t know the specifics of every single case, but what I can tell you is I don’t trust this administration to be going after real criminals, across the board, whether or not they are Iranian or not. They want to justify their policies and the additional funding that we are seeing in the Republican budget bill right now to funnel more money to ICE. We know it’s about ten times the amount of money that ICE currently gets. And so, the fact of the matter is, they’re going to go after folks. I was called a sleeper cell by Laura Loomer just on social media last week. You have people who are just deeply, deeply racist. Of course, the U.S. and Iran have had tough issues over the last 45 years, but it’s the Iranian people who have suffered the most under the regime. And the people in this country of Iranian heritage are the ones who have fled that regime, the ones who came to the United States in search of a better life, just like my parents did in the 1970s.”
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