U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake suggested again Wednesday that children brought to this country without proper documentation should be sent back to their native countries, without making clear whether that applies to those who grew up in America.
Lake’s comments in a news conference Wednesday in Phoenix and recently on CNN have referred to an undocumented immigrant population upward of 12 million. That is a figure generally understood to include a group called “Dreamers” who were brought into the U.S. as children and have in some cases grown to adulthood in America.
It is a population that has attained a measure of sympathy even by those calling for immigration overhauls and a crackdown on the undocumented. In 2022, for example, 51% of Arizona voters supported providing in-state college tuition rates to undocumented immigrants.
A 2020 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 74% of Americans supported granting permanent legal status — a classification short of citizenship — to the Dreamers. That poll found that 54% of Republicans favored that outcome as well.