Sen. Blackburn to Newsmax: Blanket Immigration Bill Also Covers Criminals

The Senate Judiciary Committee is discussing the American Dream and Promise Act, or H.R. 6, on Tuesday, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Newsmax the legislation has several problems because it offers blanket amnesty for all immigrants and not just for "Dreamers." 

"The bill does have problems if you're going to give amnesty to three million people, not just the 650,000 that are involved in the DACA program," the Tennessee Republican said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "If you're just going to do blankets and say okay, we're going to cover everybody, then think about who all gets included in this."

The bill, as written, grants citizenship not only to those who arrived to the United States as children and are covered under the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, enacted in 2012, but for people who now have temporary permission to stay in the United States, according to The Washington Post.

The problem with that, said Blackburn, is that there are people who are criminals who could be granted citizenship as a result. 

"We know that there are people that are this (criminals) because we know that there are people that are connected to MS-13 gangs," the senator said. "We know that there are people that are connected to drug trafficking, to labor crews, to sex trafficking. What you don't want to do is have a blanket that is going to normalize or reward people that have come in and said we are going to come in and outside of the rule of law. And you don't want to allow these individuals to push forward in the queue in front of individuals that have been working for years to earn. U. S citizenship."

Blackburn also commented on a video from Sky News in Australia that shows bats inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, after claims had been made that there were no bats in the giant Chinese laboratory and that the COVID-19 pandemic must have begun outside the facility. 

"It's amazing what we're beginning to find out about the Wuhan lab and how this theory was just punted aside," said Blackburn. "You had big tech, big media, all saying, oh, there is no there there. You had people at the State Department, the career bureaucrats that were trying to push against investigating the lab, and then also, they were all pushing this wet market theory and it's all falling apart on them ... the truth generally comes out sooner or later." 

The video was taken in May 2017 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and unearthed by a group of scientists known as DRASTIC that has been investigating the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was sparked by a leak from the lab. The footage, shot inside the lab, shows live bats being held there and even shows one bat hanging from a worker's hat.

Dr. Peter Daszak, a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) investigation team, has denied the presence of bats in the lab.