AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by two members, Democratic members of Congress: Jerrold
Nadler here in New York, who spent much of Saturday at JFK International Airport trying
to free some of those detained inside, and Pramila Jayapal, who was at the protest at
SeaTac airport outside of Seattle.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
Also, Congressman Nadler, you were yesterday at Battery Park.
Well over 10,000—organizers say maybe 30,000 people gathered and marched up to Federal
Plaza.
Talk about your response, who’s been detained, how you got them out and what you feel needs
to be done.
REP.
JERROLD NADLER: Well, we were told, when we got to—Nydia Velázquez and I went to JFK
airport Saturday morning, and we were told by the lawyers there that there were two people
being detained whose names we knew, who were clients of the lawyers, and 10 people whose
names we didn’t know.
And no one could talk to any of them.
We made our presence felt and talked to the CBP people, Customs and Border Protection
people, incessantly through the day.
And I like to think that we had an impact in getting two of them released.
One was Hameed Darweesh, who was on the—you played a little while ago.
And he was a fellow who had helped American troops.
He was a translator.
He put his life on the line for 10 years helping the American military.
And he was a target.
He was a target of assassination attempts.
He couldn’t go back.
And for us to threaten to deport him was not only immoral and disgusting, but ridiculous.
There’s a second person who was released Saturday night who was on a different kind
of visa.
It was an immigrant visa.
And that took—I’m sorry, a refugee visa.
We had to get intervention from the secretary level in Washington.
And he also—his wife, who is now residing in Houston, had been—had worked with the
American military, and so he was a target.
So they were—so he was eventually released.
But this whole thing, with all these people, was just disgusting.
I mean, it’s—you know, I looked at this whole thing, and I said it was unconstitutional,
illegal and dangerously stupid.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the whole issue of green card holders, as well, being drawn into this
dragnet, and now the administration is saying, "Well, henceforth, from now on, that’s not
going to be a problem"?
REP.
JERROLD NADLER: Going forward.
Going forward.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Going forward.
Going forward.
REP.
JERROLD NADLER: Yes.
Well, you know, my wife teaches at Columbia in the graduate school, and there are a lot
of foreign students there.
And right after the election, they started telling the foreign students, "Don’t go
home for winter break, because God knows what this guy is going to do, and you might be
stuck abroad."
So some people didn’t do that.
But the idea that people who lived in this country and work in this country, who went
abroad or go abroad for a funeral or whatever, can’t get back is also disgusting.
And the idea that it was done on a religious basis goes against everything this country
supposedly stands for.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Seattle Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, this is your first term in Congress.
You yourself are an immigrant to this country.
You were at the SeaTac protests, the Seattle airport.
What are you going to call for when you go back to Washington?
REP.
PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Well, we are essentially saying the same thing that Congressman Nadler
said.
This is inhumane and barbaric, and we want this president to rescind this executive order.
You know, I was called to SeaTac at around 1:00 in the afternoon.
I was there for eight hours.
Same drill.
We had to really force ourselves in to talk to Customs and Border Protection agents.
We were able to get two people that were put on a plane and were actually at the—the
plane was at the gateway ready to—ready to take off.
And we had to go and essentially hold the plane.
And we were finally able to get the two people off.
They were finally given access to legal counsel.
For a while, they were telling us they didn’t have the right to legal counsel because they
were being processed.
But, in fact, they were not in processing; they had already been released off the plane.
And so we were finally able to get them legal counsel, and then they were released early
yesterday morning.
One gentleman, though, was sent back to Somalia before we got to him.
So their family members were at SeaTac airport and had been waiting, had been anticipating
being reunited with their family member, and were left really wondering if there was a
place for any of them in this country.
And I think it—you know, we had, I think, over a thousand people at SeaTac within the
course of an hour.
And last night, we had over 10,000 people here in downtown Seattle, protesters who really
understand that this is not about immigration.
This is about who we are as a country and what we’re willing to stand up for.
And it feels familiar after 9/11 when we had to fight the Bush administration around special
registration and many other things like that.
But we are back at it and with a president who seems to not care about any of our institutions.
And we hope that he actually does listen to the nationwide stay.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Congresswoman, the issue of—the Trump administration has now tried
to calm things down by releasing folks as a result of the protests, but the reports
are coming from airports and embassies around the world now that the embassies, the U.S.
embassies, are basically canceling all appointments of—not only of people who have already appointments
set up for visas, but dual nationals, if you are, for instance, a British citizen and an
Iranian citizen, or a German citizen and a Libyan citizen, that even folks who have citizenship
in these other countries are being denied even the opportunity to get an interview or
an application.
Your sense of what this is happening—what this is doing around the world?
REP.
PRAMILA JAYAPAL: I think it is absolutely making us, first of all, less safe, because
we are putting fodder into the hands of people who do wish to do us harm, by allowing them
to essentially say that the United States hates Muslims, the United States hates immigrants.
But on top of that, I think that our standing as a country has taken a deep plunge since
this president was elected, certainly since he’s taken office, not only with this executive
order, but his other executive orders around immigration, around building the wall.
We have essentially started to cut off relationships with other countries, and we no longer are
seen as a place that really is a leader in a global world that is struggling.
And with 5 million Syrian refugees pouring out of Syria, for us to permanently or indefinitely
ban Syrian refugees is absolutely outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Trump signing his executive order on immigration
on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
He also marked the date, which commemorates the liberation of Jews at Auschwitz, with
a statement that omitted any mention of Jews.
The White House said Sunday the omission was intentional.
Jerrold Nadler, you discussed this when you spoke in Battery Park yesterday to the crowd
of over 10,000.
REP.
JERROLD NADLER: Yes.
To commemorate the Holocaust without mentioning Jews is to try to revise history.
Yes, plenty of people who were not Jewish were murdered by the Nazis, but only the Jews
were the target of an extermination attempt, to eliminate all Jews.
That was the intent of the Nazis.
That was the whole purpose of the Holocaust.
And to try to revise history, to write the Jews out of the Holocaust, in effect, is disgusting.
Now, it does go along—and we’ve seen this by far right-wing parties in Europe, and apparently
the Trump administration feels an affinity for these far right-wing parties—they’re
trying to de-Judaize the Holocaust, to rewrite history.
And that’s, frankly, disgusting, as so many other things that this administration does.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of Donald Trump, for instance, tweeting about all the
Christians that are being persecuted in the Middle East, and basically ignoring the reality
of how many Muslims have been dying in all these wars and all these battles?
REP.
JERROLD NADLER: And he lied outright when he said that it was almost impossible for
a Christian to get—to immigrate to this country from some of these countries, compared
to the Muslims.
The fact is that—I think the numbers are essentially equal: 38,000 Christians, 38,000
Muslims last year.
And when you figure that these countries’ populations are 90, 95 percent Muslims, so
that 5 percent of the population, Christian, are getting half the admissions, half the
visas, they’re not being discriminated against.
I will say the Christian populations in the Middle East are being persecuted in almost
every country except Israel.
It’s the one place where they’re not—one of the few places.
I shouldn’t say "the one place."
One of the few places where they’re not.
But in Egypt, you’ve got the Copts being persecuted and attacked; in other countries,
too.