HOUSTON (CN) — First among Democratic presidential candidates, Julián Castro has called for repeal of a law that criminalizes entering the country without documents. In Houston on Sunday he said he does not believe in separating families or in “criminalizing desperation.”
At a town hall meeting sponsored by the Harris County Democratic Party, Castro, 44, stepped on stage to raucous applause from more than 400 people squeezed into pews at St. John’s United Methodist Church in downtown Houston.
The Harvard Law School graduate and former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was raised with his twin brother, Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, by a single mother in San Antonio, with help from his grandmother who immigrated to Texas at age 7 in 1922 from northern Mexico after she was orphaned.
In 2012 Castro became the first Latino to give the keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. He said on Sunday he didn’t know if his grandma had illegally crossed into the United States or if she had papers until a few days before he gave that speech, and learned she did have an immigration pass.
“So it’s a very personal issue for me . ... I don’t believe in criminalizing desperation,” Castro said.
Though the United States made it a federal crime to enter the country without permission with passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, Section 1325, Castro said the government “didn’t see it as worth enforcing and treated it as a civil matter” until 2004, when it began prosecuting it as a crime.
Castro said such prosecutions were the basis of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, as once parents were charged with the misdemeanor they were taken away from their children in immigrant detention centers and placed in the custody of the U.S. Marshal’s Service.
“If we want to guarantee no future administration is going to separate families, we need to repeal it. … It’s cruel, inhumane, un-American and we’re not going to do it” Castro said to loud applause.
At Wednesday’s presidential debate in Miami, Castro said: “I want to challenge every single candidate on this stage to support the repeal of Section 1325,” and told his fellow Texan, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, that he was making a mistake by failing to support repeal.
Castro played down the conflict Sunday. He said it’s nothing personal and that he and his brother like O’Rourke, and campaigned for him in his near-miss bid in 2018 to unseat U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Castro took a handful of questions from the audience throughout the hour-long event, about mass shootings, LGBTQ rights, climate change, police reform, affordable housing and abortion.
He said as San Antonio’s mayor from 2009 to 2014 he signed an anti-discrimination law that included protections for LGBTQ people, and a 400-megawatt farm was built in San Antonio during his tenure that created 805 local jobs.
“If I’m elected president, the first executive order I’d sign would be to recommit the U.S. to the Paris Climate Agreement,” Castro said. The 2016 agreement was signed by 195 countries that pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to try to limit global warming.
One of Donald Trump’s first actions as president was to withdraw the United States from the accord.
On marijuana, Castro said: “I believe we should legalize it.” He said he’s a fan of states that expunge marijuana possession convictions.
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