LEADER JEFFRIES ON CNBC: "EVERYDAY AMERICANS BELIEVE THAT LIFE HASN'T GOTTEN BETTER FOR THEM UNDER THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY. IT'S ACTUALLY GOTTEN WORSE"
Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box, where he highlighted how Democrats are standing up to make life better for hardworking American taxpayers in the face of the chaos, crisis and confusion being inflicted by the Trump administration.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Welcome back to Squawk Box. It has been seven days since the Department of Homeland Security funding ran out. Democrats are still unwilling to compromise without what our next guest has called dramatic, bold and meaningful reforms. Joining us right now is House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Good morning to you. Where do you see these talks standing? And when you say dramatic and bold changes, let's walk through what those are and where the fault lines stand.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, good morning. Great to be with you. ICE is out of control and needs to be reined in, and the American people know it. And our value proposition is pretty simple. Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, particularly in the midst of a crushing affordability crisis that the President has not solved. He's made worse. But instead, we know taxpayer dollars are actually being used to unleash violence and brutality on the American people, and in some instances, kill American citizens, like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. And so, yes, dramatic reforms are necessary, including judicial warrants, which, of course, should be required before ICE can storm private property or break into homes and rip people out of those homes. We believe that independent investigations should take place when there are ICE agents who violate the law, often very violently, but are not being held accountable by the so-called Department of Justice. We think that sensitive locations like houses of worship, schools, hospitals and polling sites should be off-limits and that ICE should actually be focused on targeting violent felons who are here illegally, as opposed to law-abiding immigrant families or American citizens.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Okay, so you've walked through the issue. The question that I have is, where there is going to be some form of a compromise. We haven't talked about masks, by the way, cameras, and all of that. But to the extent that you think that there's a way to get to a compromise with the Republicans on this, it is where?
LEADER JEFFRIES: I think, one, we need Republicans to agree with the proposition that ICE should conduct itself like every other law enforcement agency in the country. We can start there, which is a pretty basic premise that Republicans seem to believe is not one that should be implemented. For instance, as it relates to masks, police officers don't wear masks, county sheriffs don't wear masks and state troopers don't wear masks. And so, we don't believe there's been any justification that has been articulated for people being unleashed in an unidentifiable fashion, brutalizing folks, using taxpayer dollars and not even targeting the worst of the worst, which is what Donald Trump promised was going to take place.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Look, here's the question. The other side says the following. They say, look, these officers are getting doxed. They're going into states that are—cities that are sanctuary cities. They are not getting the help that they're supposed to get. As a result, they are putting themselves in danger in ways that they are not in states or cities that aren't sanctuary cities. And that they're taking these steps to protect themselves and that you care more about protecting illegal immigrants than you do protecting officers of the law. That is sort of a quick rendition, I think, of the other side of this.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Yeah, so the other side spent weeks during the 43-day Trump-Republican government shutdown in the fall trying to claim that Democrats were actually fighting to provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants. The American people didn't buy that argument and they understood that we were actually fighting to make healthcare more affordable for them. And that's part of the reason why the American people appropriately blamed Donald Trump and Republicans for shutting the government down in the fall. And now we find ourselves back in the same situation where we're supposed to believe an administration that told the American people that Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were domestic terrorists when the American saw these citizens killed in cold blood without justification by ICE agents who are supposed to be protecting and serving the nation. And so, I'm not concerned about the administration's spin. We just want to deal with fact and reality. And the American people know that immigration enforcement in this country, it should be fair, it should be just and it should humane. And that is not what they're seeing. And that's what we're trying to accomplish.
JOE KERNEN: Leader Jeffries, good to see you. Last time you were on, I think I read these same six or seven things and the numbers have actually gotten a little bit better even from last time. So I want to ask you again and see if we can drill down on it. We're going to get a State of the Union on Tuesday. If you were a Trump supporter, this is what you would say. New highs in the stock market almost every week. We're at full employment at 4.3%. Inflation's at 2.4% in the most recent reading. You know, obviously still too high, it's not going, you know, affordability is still an issue, but it's down from 9%, the high for Biden. GDP, we're going to get a reading today, is expected to come in at multi-year highs. Real wages are rising. During the Biden administration, real wages fell over the four-year period. Nobody got a raise, a real weekly average raise. Gas prices are dropping after soaring under Biden, and we have a secure southern border. Are any of those things not something that Trump could at least tout on Tuesday? Where's the calamity that Democrats see at this point?
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, it's not Democrats. It's the American people. And we know that everyday Americans believe that life hasn't gotten better for them under the Trump presidency. It's actually gotten worse. Donald Trump set the standard. He said that he was going to lower costs on day one. Costs haven't gone down in the United States of America. Costs have gone up. Housing costs are out of control. Grocery costs, out of control. Healthcare costs, out of control. Utility bills, skyrocketing through the roof. Child care costs, out of control. And Donald Trump hasn't done a thing about it. And the center of his economic policy has been tariffs. We haven't seen the trade deficit be reduced in any meaningful way. We haven't seen reshoring take place. Manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. They're moving in the wrong direction. And on top of it, to make matters worse, everyday Americans are paying thousands of dollars more because of the Trump tariffs. So yes, his economic policy anchored around his inaction on the affordability crisis and in fact making things worse, so-called Liberation Day was a disaster of a day and has been getting worse ever since. Yes, that's a problem for the American people and they know it.
JOE KERNEN: Leader Jeffries, the affordability that you're talking about and the prices you're talking about, it is true they continue to go up, and the number is 2.4%. But it was 21.5% increases, the total cumulative, during the Biden administration that got prices to where they are. Now, we're 2.5% above there, which they're not going down, but the affordability crisis was really engendered in the previous four years during that administration.
LEADER JEFFRIES: The affordability crisis began, we all understand, as a result of a once-in-a-century pandemic and the impact that that, of course, had on the economy moving forward. And we all are committed to trying to resolve it, to deal with the affordability crisis. We have a President who just yesterday said the affordability crisis has been solved. So if he wants to show up on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and make that argument to the American people, have at it. The American people, of course, understand that that is not their daily experience. That's not their lived experience. That's not what themselves and their families are going through, and it's why the President's polling numbers are suffering mightily.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Where do you think the American public ultimately is on ICE and how they've reacted or behaved? I've, by the way, proposed something a little bit different, which is just a different training regime, which is to say, I don't think that most of these ICE officers are trained to deal with protesters or even what might be described as professional protesters. And the question is, how that should be solved.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, they're definitely untrained officers. Understand that what the administration has done, they enacted their One Big Ugly Bill, largest cut to Medicaid in American history, ripped healthcare away from about 14 million Americans. In the same bill, they cut SNAP by $186 billion, largest cut to nutritional assistance ever. Literally, they ripped food from the mouths of hungry children, seniors and veterans. And they did all of this so they could provide massive tax breaks to their billionaire donors, skyrocket the debt and the deficit and at the same period of time give a $75 billion slush fund to ICE so they could unleash masked and untrained officers in American communities to brutalize them and, in some cases, kill American citizens. That's all unacceptable, and the American people have articulated that forcefully. So we've talked about, as part of the demands that we've set forth, of course, the need to institute an excessive use of force prohibition policy to dramatically reform the way in which these ICE agents are trained so that they are professional. Again, all anchored in the premise that ICE should conduct themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country, not like a rogue private police force being unleashed with violence and brutality on the American people and law-abiding immigrant families.
JOE KERNEN: Do you think there should be sanctuary cities in the first place, Leader Jeffries? Is that—and does federal law—you can at least see that does set up an inherent conflict that unfortunately has ended in these tragic events. Some people might even say that it was inevitable, and the protestors, that's—they are trained, a lot of the protesters. And to almost—
LEADER JEFFRIES: The protesters have been peaceful and patriotic—
JOE KERNEN: Not always.
LEADER JEFFRIES: And no one is arguing otherwise. No one is arguing otherwise. And the administration hasn't even tried to blame those peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, right to petition the government to change policy. That's part of the DNA, the constitutional fabric of America. And you have these brutal ICE agents who are violently targeting people. Protests had nothing to do with the cold-blooded killing of Alex Pretti, and then the fact that the administration turned around and called an ICU nurse who dedicated his life to helping out veterans a domestic terrorist. And so the American people aren't buying the spin of Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller or the administration. We just want immigration enforcement that is fair, just and humane. We also have an immigration system, of course, we understand that is broken, and we need to fix it. But we should fix it in a comprehensive and bipartisan way, not by trying to jam extreme right-wing, violent policies down the throats of the American people.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Okay, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, I want to thank you for joining us this morning and engaging in the discussion and the debate, and we look forward to talking to you again very, very soon.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Thank you very much.
Full interview can be watched here.