Former President Donald Trump’s campaign team issued a lengthy rebuttal Thursday (May 25) night to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ claims about immigration made during his official campaign launch.
One of the Trump campaign’s most prominent attacks against DeSantis is that as a member of Congress, DeSantis voted for the DACA bill, which he is now attacking Trump for pursuing.
A day earlier, DeSantis turned the tables on Trump’s months-long attacks against him by questioning the former President’s immigration record, saying, “I thought it was supposed to be America First policy to oppose amnesty, and yet [Trump] endorsed and tried to ram through an amnesty.”
However, on June 23, 2018, as Trump’s campaign highlighted, then-Rep. DeSantis lauded voting for a bill that is “exactly what President Trump promised,” adding that 193 Republican House Representatives voted for it.
At the time, DeSantis said the bill was the only one he’d seen in Congress “that would actually solve the problem of illegal immigration.”
According to the Trump campaign, on June 21, 2018, DeSantis voted for H.R. 760, the “Securing America’s Future Act of 2018,” sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).
The campaign highlighted that Trump had followed through on his promise to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), prompting the most conservative members of Congress to propose H.R. 4760 that leveraged the expiration of Barack Obama’s unlawful amnesty program to “force Democrats to effectively repeal Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act.”
While DeSantis was part of a group of GOP Reps. that voted in favor of the bill the first time, he then voted against the bill’s second rendition after Trump suggested it wouldn’t clear the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold.
DeSantis’ recent comments on immigration have caused Trump’s campaign to accuse the Florida Governor of “shamelessly copying” the former President’s “incredibly successful America First immigration and border security agenda.”
