CNN’s Kayyem: Pause on DV1 Program After Brown Shooting Is Premature Focus on Immigration Over Guns, No One I Know Thought About Immigration

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Story Is,” CNN Senior National Security Analyst and The Atlantic Contributing Writer Juliette Kayyem responded to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announcing a pause on the DV1 program in the wake of the shooting at Brown University by stating that doing so “is the Trump administration going after immigrants, rather than looking at the sort of longer issues of what happened here, protection for our students, guns and access to guns, all of those issues that are also at play.” And “No one I know left that press conference saying this is an immigration issue. But, as we know, the Trump administration will use many of these instances as a way to sort of promote their sort of anti-immigrant stance. And I think it’s just premature at this stage, especially because the dating appears, right now, to put his lawful status being allowed in the United States under the first Trump administration.”

Kayyem said, “We’ll have to see what they mean…we don’t know enough right now about when his status was regularized, because the dates actually appear to be during the first Trump administration. And why they are coming out so quickly, an hour after the press conference, to say that a group of people who are on this visa status are all now going to be denied it because of someone who was not on this visa status — he was lawfully here as a permanent resident — why they should all be harmed. I want to be super careful here, because we don’t know enough about…immigration status, in terms of when and exactly where he got the immigration status. But I do want to say this kind of reaction is like apples and oranges, right? It really is. It is the Trump administration going after immigrants, rather than looking at the sort of longer issues of what happened here, protection for our students, guns and access to guns, all of those issues that are also at play.”

She continued, “No one I know left that press conference saying this is an immigration issue. But, as we know, the Trump administration will use many of these instances as a way to sort of promote their sort of anti-immigrant stance. And I think it’s just premature at this stage, especially because the dating appears, right now, to put his lawful status being allowed in the United States under the first Trump administration. If they have evidence that that didn’t happen, it would be good for them to show it, but that’s the dating we have right now.”

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