Ohio Governor John Kasich says federal immigration officials following federal laws by deporting illegal aliens is “not my country.”

In an interview with open borders activist and journalist Jorge Ramos, Kasich said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “dead wrong” for enforcing federal immigration laws by deporting illegal aliens back to their native countries.

Ramos asked Kasich if he believed the current 12 to 30 million illegal aliens currently residing in the United States should be allowed to stay in the country permanently. Kasich responded:

I don’t think they should be citizens, but I think they should be able to be here, yes, and live in our country. But the idea that we would try to just go round them up… and look, these stories where these ICE agents are going into people’s homes, to me, that’s not my country. That’s not the way that I think we should handle these things. I think it’s dead wrong. [Emphasis added]

My podcast: John Kasich speaks to a different side of the Republican Party https://t.co/RxeRDwMvoQ via @Audioboom — JORGE RAMOS (@jorgeramosnews) February 2, 2018

Earlier in the interview, Kasich said he opposed President Trump’s popular, pro-American views on immigration, favoring a multicultural society.

“I happen to believe that a society that allows people to come in with kind of different views, different attitudes, different beliefs, strengthens your country, it doesn’t weaken your country,” Kasich said.

Kasich’s open borders views remain out-of-tune with the majority of Americans who, when polled this week, said they want to see the construction of Trump’s planned wall for the U.S.-Mexico border, as Breitbart News reported.

Likewise, a plurality of Americans said they want to see legal immigration levels reduced to one to 250,000 legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. a year – a plan that would raise the wages of American workers while increasing the quality of life and decreasing the immigration burden for America’s working and middle-class communities.

When asked, “In your opinion, about how many legal immigrants should be admitted to the U.S. each year,” 48 percent of black Americans in the latest Harvard-Harris poll said they would like to see between one and 250,000 legal immigrants brought to the U.S. a year.

Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from family-based chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In 2016, the legal and illegal immigrant population reached a record high of 44 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.

Mass legal immigration to the U.S. has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.