Dem tears into Kelly over immigrant comments: ‘He eats the vegetables that they pick’

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) on Friday tore into White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comments about immigrants being poorly educated and unskilled while lauding immigrants who take up agricultural work.

“You know the ones I was thinking about when he was saying that?” Gutierrez said on CNN. “The ones that probably came across undocumented to work in the fields. He eats the vegetables that they pick — that no American will go out and pick. He eats the fruit of their labor, literally and figuratively.”

{mosads}

Gutierrez was responding to Kelly’s claim from an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” where he appeared to say that the vast majority of immigrants who enter illegally “don’t have skills” and would not “integrate well” into American society. 

“Do immigrants come here to be doctors, to be engineers, to be teachers, to be wonderful highly educated people? Yes,” Gutierrez responded on CNN.

The Illinois Democrat is a frequent critic of President Trump and his administration’s immigration policies.

In January, he slammed Trump as an “outwardly, explicitly racist American president.”