At yesterday's press conference announcing that legal immigrants could be deported for something like using food stamps, one reporter asked this question.

REPORTER: The words at the base of the Statue of Liberty read, 'Give us your tired, your poor,' you're implementing a public charge rule for the first time-- is that still operative in the United States or should those words come down, should the plaque come down on the Statue of Liberty?

Ken Cuccinelli, who made the announcement, replied:

CUCCINELLI: I'm not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty. We have a long history of being one of the most welcoming nations in the world on a lot of bases. Whether you be an asylum seeker, coming here to join your family or immigrating yourself, I don't think we're ready to take anything off the Statue of Liberty.

Could have fooled me! Once someone's a citizen, why are they not entitled to the same help in hard times as anyone else? Now they'll be considered a "public charge."

"Just your reaction to the regulation, again, we're talking about legal immigrants having basically a wealth standard as to whether or not you can enter the country," Willie Geist asked Sen. Mazie Hirono, Judiciary committee member.

"This is yet another assault on immigration and immigrants, and now with the new rules, it's gonna be harder for people to stay in our country and harder for them to come into our country. All this talk about 'we're not taking anything off of the Statue of Liberty, please. Please, B.S. That's all I can say," Hirono said.

"So as a United States senator, this is a regulation coming. What can you all do about this, thwarting this if you believe it ought to be done?" Geist said.

"Well, we knew this was being contemplated, so many of us wrote to the administration, saying 'don't do it.' They had almost 300,000 comments on this proposal -- proposed legislation that will make it harder for immigrants in our country," she said.

"So it pretty much fell on deaf ears because this administration, this president, is so anti-immigrant that they're doing everything they can to make life as hard as possible for people who are already here legally and people who want to come here. So anybody who is under 18, over 61, there's going to count against you and of course the public charge has been expanded to such a degree that people who want to stay here longer are going to have a harder time qualifying."

The public charge requirement was first instituted by nativists to stop the influx of Irish immigrants. Call it what it is, which is ethnic cleansing. Creepy little Stephen Miller is getting his way, and destroying what made America great. Tra la!