Warren Promises on ‘First Day’ as President to Set Up Commission to Investigate U.S. Crimes Against Immigrants

Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks on stage at 2019 ESSENCE Festival Presented By Coca-Cola a
Paras Griffin/Getty Images for ESSENCE

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of only four 2020 Democrat presidential candidates to speak at the Netroots Nations conference in Philadelphia, where she promised to set up a commission to study alleged crimes the U.S. has committed against immigrants.

“To anyone out there who is working in this system,” Warren said in remarks on Saturday. “Understand, you abuse immigrants, you physically abuse immigrants, you sexually abuse immigrants, you fail to get the medical care that they need, you break the law of the United States of America.”

“And Donald Trump may be willing to look the other way, but President Elizabeth Warren will not,” Warren said. “On my first day, I will empower a commission in the Department of Justice to investigate crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.”

The Daily Beast reported on the leftwing Netroots Nation’s conference, saying:

The conversation around the Trump administration’s immigration policies, which have become hallmarks of its cruelty to Democrats, dominated the closing day of Netroots.

The yearly progressive activist conference, which drew some 4,000 registered attendees according to event organizers, featured two marquee keynote addresses on Saturday, where presidential candidates and members of Congress alike decried the administration’s family separation policy, conditions in detention facilities at the border and the planned raids.

“We’re going to look back at this moment as a very, very dark time,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said during a morning panel that also had some of the most leftist new members of the House, Reps. Deb Haaland (D-NM), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA).

“We’re going to look back and say what did we do as a nation to push against this?” Tlaib said. “This is a whole generation of children that will forget what our nation did to them.”

“If you flew here and there was a baby crying on that plane, you wouldn’t ask where that baby was from, you wouldn’t ask if it was sick, you wouldn’t ask its name but everyone on the plane offers advice to lull, to comfort and to quiet that child,” Pressley said. “These are all our children and we should be doing the same damn thing.”

Only three other 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls showed up at the conference, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Julian Castro, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

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