Charlie Kirk on a potential pathway to legal residency for immigrants: “We need to kill it now, early”
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From the July 8, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I think every reasonable member of our common sense movement could potentially at least say, you know what? I see it. You've been here for 15 years. You know, you've worked as a chef. OK. Now hold on. Now first of all, I principally don't share that view, but I understand if you do. However, let me just repeat again what someone is likely to propose. Illegals that have been here for 10 years, committed no crimes, they should be given a pathway to legal residency, not citizenship.
OK. So I want you to think about this in three different steps. Number one, we do not know how many illegals are in America, and there is no record whatsoever of when they came in. The Democrats are not wrong about something. They are undocumented. We have no documentation whatsoever. Therefore, there's a great mystery around their status. So if someone has been here 16 years or someone has been here for six months, how do you define this? The 1986 amnesty was like this. 3 million people got it, way more than were expected. People were still claiming that amnesty within the past decade. So the '86 amnesty lasted many more years. You can still claim it, by the way, as long as you argue you did agricultural labor in 1985. So basically, you're expanding a window that as long as you're willing to lie, you can get some form of amnesty.
Now, here's the key, though. Here's the kicker. That's important. But the more important one that will end this proposal and should make it DOA. So therefore, since we do not know when illegals came in, if ICE, for example, has their hands on a MS-13 gang member who has not necessarily committed crimes, but he needs to go. All that MS-13 gang member needs to do is say, nope. You can't deport me. I've been here for 10 years. And that person then gets put into a three-to-five year court process. This would effectively end all deportations immediately in our country. All of them.
What I'm saying though is that it sounds good. Illegals that have been here for 10 years, no crimes, pathway to legal residency — every single illegal, every bad hombre would say, well, I've been here for 10 years. And they might be lying, but what they're doing is more intentional, is that they're gonna delay the process and short circuit all deportations in real time. This basically — another way of thinking about this is they would use the asylum scam model where our asylum system is a total scam. So they know that if you go to the southern border and say the magic words, hocus pocus, you're able to then abracadabra, you're able to stay in the country.
So what this proposal — and again, it's not an official proposal. It's still in the ether. But we need to kill it now, early. What it would be able to do is that every illegal would in real time, as soon as an ICE officer comes up to them, the ICE officer would not be able to lay hands on them. They'd say, nope. I've been here for 10 years. I've been here for 10 years. Sorry. And it's a — and the ICE officer could say, no, no. I — nope. I got to have a court date. And that court date would be five-to-seven years. Three-to-five-to-seven years. It would stop all deportations in real time.