Political activist Tom Steyer‘s Need to Impeach organization is paying for the ad, which people familiar with the purchase say will run in the seven figures, and air on CNN, MSNBC and on Fox during the World Cup. | John Minchillo/AP Photo Steyer ad links children crying to ‘lawless president’

Tom Steyer wants the country to hear the children crying.

The billionaire activist is launching a new ad Wednesday with 15 seconds of audio from within the detention centers, followed by his voice: “Terrible things happen when you leave a lawless president in power,” he says, in an early version of the ad obtained by POLITICO.


He then turns the attention to Congress: “If they won’t stand up to him, they’re just as responsible as he is.”

Steyer’s Need to Impeach organization is paying for the ad, which people familiar with the purchase say will run in the seven figures, and air on CNN, MSNBC and on Fox during the World Cup. It will also be pushed out heavily on social media.

Steyer has continued to travel the country pushing impeachment, but he has slowly expanded his focus to other issues — while linking them all back as reasons to force President Donald Trump from office. The ad will go forward even with Trump’s signing an executive order on Wednesday afternoon reversing his own policy.

The ad follows Steyer’s announcement, through his NextGen America group last week, of $1 million toward legal fees for people facing deportation.

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Usually Steyer has been going it alone — his calls to impeach the president haven’t been going over well with most Democrats. But on this, he’s working with the Latino Victory Fund.

“Congressional Republicans should be terrified,” said the Fund’s president, Cristobal Alex. “The American people will hold them accountable for their silence and complicity in the face of children’s suffering.”

Steyer isn’t the only one up with a political ad around the crisis. Rep. John Delaney, a Maryland congressman who’s already launched his campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination, released an ad that his campaign says has several hundred thousand dollars behind it, and that will run during MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday and then in Iowa next week.

The ad invokes his own grandfather’s trip through Ellis Island with his siblings. “95 years ago an act of shared humanity kept a family together,” Delaney says. “If it seems like we’ve lost that lately, maybe it’s time to get it back.”



CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the purpose for NextGen America‘s payment of $1 million. It is to be used toward legal fees for people facing deportation.