Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult Defending New Racist Tirade

But more than anything, more than just like, I think, Somalis, this is another blatant attack on immigrant communities. Obviously, any administration, Democratic or Republican, should be enforcing the law. We should be following our immigration laws. People in this country should be abiding by their immigration laws. But I think this blatant targeting without any clear proof or logic or even kind of theory of what it is is deeply concerning. Look, if people are violent criminals, if they’re offenders, if they are a threat to this country, certainly, I think those kinds of folks should be removed. But I think this kind of just blatant painting of an entire community, of an entire population of folks with one broad brushstroke is deeply troubling and problematic.

Sargent: Well, you brought up Temporary Protected Status, which is often called TPS. Can you just give us a really brief overview of what that is? I want to point out for people that Trump has actually ended TPS for a number of different groups. This is something that is given to people who are facing some of the very worst conditions imaginable on the planet. Can you talk about what TPS is?

Patel: Yeah, Temporary Protected Status—essentially, it’s what it sounds like. People who are in the United States from a particular country, they are protected from removal and returning back to their home country. There are a number of countries, historically, in which the United States has had this TPS program. Somalia is an example. Haiti is another country in which, historically, there’s been a TPS program. Another one is Venezuela, and so on and so forth. And basically, when you designate somebody under a TPS, under Temporary Protected Status, the secretary of Homeland Security will say that any person of country of origin, of fill-in-the-blank country, if they’ve been in the United States since X date because of the conditions on the ground in that country, they are protected from removal from the United States because the conditions in those countries are so often they have to deal with just danger, threat, things like that, human rights conditions, but also impact from natural disasters and things like that. Just whatever all these conditions that make it such that conditions on the ground in this particular country make it so that they should not be returned there. And we’ve had this; it’s a bipartisan program that has existed in this country for many, many years. And there have been a lot of countries in which we’ve had TPS designation for, historically.