Rosie Perez has complex feelings about immigration in the United States. Speaking with former “The View” colleague Nicolle Wallace for MS NOW’s “The Best People” podcast on Monday, Perez said that she thinks the country does not immigration reform for individuals entering the country illegal, but that President Trump’s ICE efforts have gone too far.
“We do need some type of enforcement on immigration,” Perez said. “We do. And we do need to get hardened violent criminals out of our country. We do. But somebody who has applied for asylum and is going to court and following the paperwork – you really gonna do that to them? You’re going to put them on that same level? It’s sad. It’s just, it’s really, really sad.”
The conversation came about when Wallace asked the actress what she thought about the state of the immigration crackdown, protests and fatal ICE enforcement in Minneapolis.
“My friend Peter came over to dinner. He goes, ‘You all right?’ I said, ‘No, no, I’ve been crying all day. I’ve been crying all day. It’s just, it’s too much.’ I mean, I think that what people feel, when you look at the numbers just on the Trump side, the promise is to remove the worst of the worst. The worst of the worst are primarily in jail. They’re adjudicated criminals. By and large, the people they’re targeting at preschools and at landscaping jobs and at schools and in hospitals are not people who’ve committed any crimes, let alone violent crimes.”
Watch the full conversation below:
Rage against ICE raids hit a new boiling point in January following the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while protesting ICE in Minneapolis last month. Trump later said ICE regrets killing the peaceful protesters, but maintained that both victims were “no angel.” The president received plenty of pushback from the media, including late night hosts for saying ICE felt bad for the deaths. Jimmy Kimmel did not let the comment that agents felt worse than the victims’ families go easily.
“A lot of people would think it would be the parents or the spouses or the children of the victims — but then, there are a lot of people who don’t have a brain that’s shrunken down smaller than one of an Oompa-Loompa’s balls,” he said in a recent monologue.
Earlier in their “The Best People” episode, Wallace and Perez recalled initially finding common ground in their friendship as political moderates on “The View” while discussing then-President George W. Bush.
