…but what else would you expect from Goodlatte?

As if House Republicans haven’t done enough damage to America yet.

Today, the House Judiciary Committee lead by Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) will take up a series of anti-immigrant bills intended to “turbocharge Trump’s mass deportation agenda”, and the Goodlatte bills will make it easier to deport immigrants whom the Administration should not be removing.

Headlines today point out that immigration arrests are up 38% nationwide under Trump, including a 156% increase in the arrests of undocumented immigrants without a criminal record. That’s mothers, fathers, Dreamers, and family members who are being deported — people who would’ve qualified for legalization and citizenship under legislation considered just a few short years ago.

Goodlatte bills going to committee markup 

The Goodlatte bills, however, seek to deport everyone ICE can get their hands on. The bills being considered this week would:

• Require ICE officers to have access to not just standard-issue handguns and stun guns, but also M-4 rifles or equivalents
• Add 10,000 officers focused on deportation, 2,500 in detention, and 60 trial attorneys
• Authorize officers to make an arrests, even for people who have only committed civil offenses, without a warrant
• Codify Trump’s VOICE office, which exists to argue that all immigrants are criminals
• Restrict lawmakers from influencing individual immigration cases by barring “preferential treatment” or sharing information with elected officials
• Authorize E-Verify, which would devastate the US agricultural industry and the farm workers who work in it

It seems that Chairman Goodlatte is back with a vengeance. When we last saw him in the news, he was trying to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics during a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus, only to be pilloried and stopped by a national outcry just a day later. It was a brazen attempt to pass something completely contrary to Americans’ interests — but if you look at Goodlatte’s record on immigration, there are a lot of similar examples.

Goodlatte and the John Tanton network

Goodlatte is loved by NumbersUSA, the hate group-adjacent Tanton network organization that opposes legal as well as undocumented immigration. He has a career-long “A” grade from them, including an “A+” for the current Congressional term, and NumbersUSA in 2010 bestowed a “Blue Ribbon” on Goodlatte for opposing as many immigration reform bills as he could that year. He supports changing the Constitution to end birthright citizenship, has called refugee children at the border a “tsunami“, has called for the deportation of Dreamers, wants to turn all local police officers in the US into immigration agents, and wants to criminalize all undocumented immigrants living in the US. He once also had the gall to say that President Obama’s DACA program undermined “Congress’ hard work to reform our immigration laws” — at a time when House Republicans had just spent a year doing absolutely nothing to further immigration reform.

Between this history and Goodlatte’s bills this week, it’s clear that the House Judiciary Chairman is an anti-immigrant restrictionist in the extreme who is trying to implement his hardline agenda. Advocates and supportive members of Congress need to shut him down.