The acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Monday he doesn’t see President Trump’s recent attacks against liberal women in the House as racist.
Ken Cuccinelli said he hasn’t read the tweets from Mr. Trump because he has been focused on policy — namely fixing the massive backlog of asylum claims.
When he was read the tweets during an appearance on CNN and asked whether he thinks they were racist, Mr. Cuccinelli said he did not.
“No, I see that as presumably political hand grenades, but I wouldn’t go that far — no certainly not,” Mr. Cuccinelli said.
Pressured further, Mr. Cuccinelli said he is concentrating on policy — not Twitter wars.
“Look, you’ve spent a lot of time on Twitter,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time doing an actual job where asylum is at risk, and where we are trying to process legal immigrants who are obeying our rules and to turn away the illegals who are fraudulently trying to get into our country.”
Mr. Cuccinelli said Mr. Trump isn’t getting any help from members of Congress and suggested Mr. Trump’s comments could prove helpful if it “jars” Democrats on Capitol Hill to help fix the broken immigration system.
“Congress isn’t doing its job, leaving the front line officers and ICE agents on the interior to deal with overcrowding and to deal with doing a job Congress charged them to do without the resources to do it properly,” Mr. Cuccinelli said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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