Julián Castro Quotes

he should end this policy. If I were elected president, I would immediately end this “Remain in Mexico” policy. It flies in the face of the United States policy of allowing people who are making a claim of asylum to remain in the United States while their claim is adjudicated.

we can’t ignore the fact, of course, that this president is trying to suppress the vote as a strategy to rig this election and win.

we, as Americans, are more alike than different.

my hope is that this president is going to be held to account for what he’s done in terms of violating his oath of office and abusing his power, that he will be impeached, that he will be removed from office. If he is not impeached and removed, he’s going to be defeated on November 3rd, 2020, and that this nightmare, with respect to how he’s treating migrants, will be over.

I guess I would have to explain the difference between Mexican and Cuban, you know?

we actually need to create an independent immigration court system, that’s independent from the Department of Justice, with enough judges and support staff to hear these asylum claims and get people an answer in a timely manner. Some people will get asylum. We also know that some people will not. But people should not be waiting years to get an answer on their asylum claim.

I do think — I agree with you on the issue of representation. You know, last week, I think the count had been that there were 35 primetime speakers, and only three of them were Latinx. And I raised, you know, a concern about that and also, at that time, a lack of representation among Native Americans and Muslim Americans, because I don’t believe that that represents the — that represented the beautiful coalition that Democrats have put together.

Teaching is one of the most creative and exhausting jobs I have ever had. Clever political adversaries, irate constituents, and elbow-throwing litigators were never as tough to handle as those students were on a daily basis.

I realized that I would be much better off just being myself around people. That way I'd attract friends who liked the real me, not some person I was trying to be.

we wanted to highlight especially the claims of members of the LGBTQ community and also one person who is disabled. She’s deaf. We were highlighting them specifically because under the terms of the “Remain in Mexico” policy itself, somebody with a physical issue or mental health trauma is supposed to be exempted. In other words, they’re supposed to be allowed to remain in the United States while their claim is adjudicated, instead of being sent back to Mexico. These members of the LGBTQ community, they have been persecuted. They’ve been subjected to violence. They’ve been threatened. They’re suffering trauma and, some of them, PTSD. And so, we believe that they should qualify for that exemption because of the mental health trauma they’re going through. And the person who is deaf has a physical disability, a physical issue. She never should have been put in that program in the first place.

One of the most interesting classes I took, "Europe and the Americas," detailed the systematic and brutally efficient decimation of indigenous peoples and cultures. One of the required books, I, Rigoberta Menchú, recounted the struggle of indigenous Guatemalans. Later on, in "Imagining the Holocaust," I heard the horrific account of what happened to Jews during World War II. At Stanford I was forced to pull back from my tight community and understand how a common thread ran through so many other cultures around the world where people had to fight for their rights.

What I believe is that our diversity in this country makes us strong, that we can harness the potential of immigrants, and that, for generations, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, have made this country stronger, have powered our economy, have helped ensure that we continue to move forward as a nation. And that’s going to continue to be the case in the future. And I believe that we should increase the number of people that we’re taking in as refugees and asylees, and that we should put undocumented immigrants who are here in the United States on a pathway to citizenship, as long as they have not committed a serious crime here in the United States. That’s what I would do as president.

Embrace your own unlikely journey.

College is fantastic for a variety of reasons, but that opportunity to bond with people of very different backgrounds, to pull knowledge-big and small-from such a diverse pool, is invaluable, especially in the formative years.

I did not see that op-ed, but I think that Jorge puts it very well there, that — you know, that this was something that Mexico agreed to. And to me, that was surprising, given the history of López Obrador and what I thought he would stand for and do once he was in office.