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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with coverage of last night's candidate forum in Iowa and related policy announcements.
Fusionreports:
Moderator and Fusion contributor Akilah Hughes asked Clinton how her administration would prove that black lives matter, not just say it.
“Criminal justice reform, policing reform, incarceration reform—I believe strongly that this has to be the strongest priority of our [next] president,”she said.
Clinton rattled off a perfunctory list of ways she would “disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline”—ending the incarceration of low-level offenders, seeking alternative treatment options to incarceration, and incentivizing private investment in “the most disinvested” communities— without detailing an execution plan. Clinton also stressed that these reforms make also make economic sense.
“[Our current system] is such a violation of what we say our values are, you know, ‘equal before the law,'”the candidate said. “Well, we have systemic racism and bias that is implicit in our system, and unless we begin to go after that and expose it and end it we won’t solve this problem.”
The Des Moines Register reports:
Clinton told moderators at the Iowa Brown and Black Forum that while trying to get immigration reform bills through Congress, she would use presidential powers to implement current laws more fairly.
Journalist and moderator Jorge Ramos asked Clinton if she would be the “deporter-in-chief” as president. She said she would not.
“I cannot sit here and tell you I have a blanket rule about who will or who won’t be let into the country to stay, because it has to be done individual by individual,” she said. “What I don’t like are the mass roundups and the raids ... That should end.”
QUOTE: “African-American men, and Latino men in particular, get arrested more quickly for doing the same thing a white man does. And then it continues through the process. They’re more likely to be charged, more likely to be convicted, more likely to be incarcerated. … It is such a violation of what we say our values are.”
BEST MOMENT: Clinton was asked if she believed fellow Democrat Bernie Sanders could be elected president. She drew guffaws from the audience with this response: “Anybody can win! Who would have thought that Donald Trump could be leading national polls? I mean, if you ever thought about running for president, take heart!”
The Huffington Postreports:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for an end to the Obama administration's deportation raids targeting mothers and children fleeing violence in Central America, arguing the policy creates "unnecessary fear and disruption."
"Our immigration enforcement efforts should be humane and conducted in accordance with due process, and that is why I believe we must stop the raids happening in immigrant communities," Clinton said in a statement. "We have laws and we must be guided by those laws, but we shouldn’t have armed federal officers showing up at peoples’ homes, taking women and children out of their beds in the middle of the night. The raids have sown fear and division in immigrant communities across the country."
Clinton's statement was accompanied by a plan to address the number of Central American immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. In addition to ending the raids, Clinton called for providing government-funded attorneys to those seeking asylum, reforming the refugee process and addressing problems facing Central America.