Will Hurd on Trump’s Tweet about 4 Democratic Congresswomen

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: How do you describe that? Do you call it xenophobic? Do you believe its racist?

WILL HURD: I think those tweets are racist and xenophobic. They are also inaccurate, right. The four women he is referring to are actually citizens of the United States, three of the four were born here. It’s also a behavior that’s unbecoming of the leader of the free world. He should be talking about things that unite us, not divides us. And also, I think, politically, it doesn’t help.

While you had a civil war going on within the Democratic Party, between the far-left and the rest of the party, now they have circled the wagons and are starting to protect one another. We can disagree without being disagreeable. I don’t agree with many of the things they are talking about and that – or (ph) proposals that they are putting forward, but that’s where the debate should be on, not these other issues.

AMANPOUR: Can I just ask you why you think the president keeps doing this kind of stuff, making controversial comments on Twitter and stoking certain flames? I mean, do you think the president is racist?

HURD: Well, you’d have to ask him those questions, but the comments were indeed racist. Look, I’m the only black in the Republican in the House of

Representatives. I go into communities that most Republicans don’t show up in order to take a conservative message. And when you have this being the debate, that activity becomes even harder.

And the only way we’re going to — you know, I’m from Texas. And I always say, “If the Republican Party in Texas doesn’t start looking like Texas, there won’t be a Republican Party in Texas.” And I think that goes for the rest of the country. So, this makes it harder in order to take our ideas and our platform to communities that don’t necessarily identify with the Republican Party.

AMANPOUR: So now, let’s talk about the other big issue and that is asylum and immigration and detention and zero-tolerance policy and all of that.

So, what about now, the administration has petitioned to make formal what has been talking about a long time and that is almost no asylum in the

United States except via a third country?

HURD: Sure. That proposal was announced this morning. I do believe that our asylum laws should be tweaked. I think this move is probably going to get challenged in the courts. This is something that I’ve said, if we are going to tweak our asylum laws — or my (ph) asylum laws, it needs to be done in Congress.

And we need — and unfortunately, there are people that are taking advantage of our asylum laws. One of the other things that should stop happening is we should stop treating everybody that’s coming into this country illegally as if they are an asylum seeker. Not everybody is actually asking for asylum. And when the asylum laws are being abused, this hurts the people that actually need asylum laws.