Does Rep. McSally support amnesty?
THE MEDIA: Radio.
WHO SAID IT: Kelli Ward.
THE PARTY: Republican.
THE RACE: Senate Republican Primary.
THE TARGET: Rep. Martha McSally.
THE COMMENT: “What if I told you about... someone who voted for amnesty 11 times... sadly Martha McSally said and did all of this.”
THE FORUM: Radio ad released July 16, 2018,
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT: Did Rep. Martha McSally vote for amnesty 11 times, as her GOP primary opponent for the U.S. Senate, Kelli Ward, claimed in a radio ad (as well as in fliers and posts on Twitter)?
ANALYSIS: In an attempt to portray her opponent in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate as weak on immigration enforcement, Ward has accused McSally of voting in favor ofamnesty 11 times during her three years in office.
A spokesman for Ward said the campaign defines a vote for amnesty as any bill that would “grant a legal status or some other type of reward to those who have come here illegally and absolve them from any future prosecution or consequence.”
That is a hard-line definition of amnesty, as some view it as granting legal status with no penalty (such as paying a fine).
All but one of McSally’s actions cited by Ward’s team had to do with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which provides temporary legal protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country illegally as children.
The one bill that doesn’t was the 2018 Omnibus bill, which funded the government for the year. It was criticized by anti-immigration advocates because it increased the number of immigration visas, but it had no language that provided a permanent legal status to any group of undocumented immigrants.
The campaign said they selected most of those bills from a report card of lawmakers’ votes created by Numbers USA, a group that describes itself as an “immigration-reduction organization.”
In the section of the report card that looked at efforts to “reduce amnesty enticements,” only 10 actions taken by McSally were included. Of those, eight increased “amnesty enticements,” while one did not, according to Numbers USA.
The remaining bill was a measure McSally originally co-sponsored but that she removed her name from in May in support of a tougher DACA fix. It would have provided a path to permanent legal status.
Angela Banks, a law professor at Arizona State University who specializes in immigration and citizenship law, said that by the campaign’s definition, for any legislation to be considered an amnesty bill it would have to provide some form of permanent legal status.
“The clause at the end ‘and absolve them from any future prosecution or consequence’ has only ever been provided with the grant of legal status,” she said.
DACA, “does not absolve its recipients ‘from any future prosecution or consequence.’ It only protects recipients from deportation for a specified period of time,” she said.
Zachary Henry, press secretary for the Ward campaign disagreed, arguing that any extension of DACA is just a