Compliance » Trump’s Man Cuccinelli, Former AG, Unsung Anti-Immigration Champion

Trump’s Man Cuccinelli, Former AG, Unsung Anti-Immigration Champion

August 22, 2019

Woodcut expressionist style of the metaphor for blind justice.

The former Virginia attorney general has received less attention on this issue than Trump adviser Stephen Miller (the subject of a recent front-page profile in the New York Times) But this take from last week’s The Atlantic magazine makes the case that Ken Cuccinelli, now Acting Citizenship and Immigration Services Director, is an important player and a notably committed one on what’s often said to the number one issue for many of Trump’s core supporters. When the administration’s “public-charge” rule was announced last week, denying permanent residence to legal immigrants who are receiving public assistance, it fell to Cuccinelli to publicly defend it. “It was as though Cuccinelli, in briefing journalists on the rule, had served as little more than a suited vessel for Miller’s worldview. But to shift focus away from Cuccinelli is to ignore the very real convictions he brings to bear in this administration,” says Atlantic staff writer Elaina Plott. Among the policies he has pushed at various times in his career are the elimination of birthright citizenship and making speaking Spanish on the job a fireable offense. It was Cuccinelli who, in a recent testy exchange with an NPR journalist, suggested a rewrite for the slogan on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

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