Those already accustomed to flagrantly disregarding our laws do not hesitate to traffic their deadly cocktail of drugs and gang violence into Virginia.” “Porous borders and lax immigration enforcement have left us vulnerable not only to terrorist attacks but to increasing levels of crime in our communities. “We face very real security threats today,” Cuccinelli said at the time. In a May 2007 press release announcing he was joining the group, Cuccinelli explained his participation in terms of security. “State Legislators for Legal Immigration has been formed to serve as a unifying force to bring all levels of government together to terminate America’s illegal alien invasion from the Keystone State of Pennsylvania to every city, community, small town, main street, front porch and back yard across our fruited plains and from sea to shining sea,” the group’s website read at the time, drawing from “America the Beautiful.” Neither the White House nor US Citizenship and Immigration Services responded to a request for comment. And here, I don’t think with the caravan it’s even debatable because you’ve got an entire group that’s organized itself to come into the country.”Ĭuccinelli, who announced a rule this week limiting green cards for migrants in need or deemed likely to become in need of public assistance, drew criticism this week for claiming that the famed Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty – which reads “give me your tired, your poor” – should be reimagined with the phrase “who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.” He sought to defend his revision by saying “that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.”īut those views are in line with what he expressed more than a decade ago as a state legislator in Virginia, when he was one of the first state lawmakers to join State Legislators for Legal Immigration, a group started by Daryl Metcalfe, a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives with a history of provocative statements. “Their purpose here is to violate the border, to violate our sovereignty, for their own purposes. “When someone comes across your border without your permission, it’s an invasion,” he added. You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it.” Literally, you don’t have to keep them, no catch and release, no nothing. They can literally just line their National Guard up with, presumably with riot gear like they would if they had a civil disturbance, and turn people back at the border. And because they’re acting under war powers, there’s no due process. And what’s interesting is they don’t need anyone’s permission,” Cuccinelli said. “We’ve been being invaded for a long time, and so the border states clearly qualify here to utilize this power themselves. Speaking with Breitbart radio in October of last year, Cuccinelli argued that states could use “war powers” to block Central American migrants, many of whom were reportedly planning to seek asylum in the US and who’d formed a so-called caravan, from coming across the border.

Its founding principle was that undocumented immigration represented an invasion of the United States on par with foreign invasion that should justify invoking war powers under the Constitution – extreme rhetoric Cuccinelli has continued to use in recent years, and that has been adopted by President Donald Trump and other Republicans. The group, State Legislators for Legal Immigration, was established in 2007, when an immigration revamp was being hotly debated in Congress. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, was a founding member of a group more than a decade ago that described undocumented immigrants as “foreign invaders” responsible for “serious infectious diseases, drug running, gang violence, human trafficking, terrorism.”

Trump alien invasion