“If we agree as a country that we want 20 million people deported … I will support that decision,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., who is co-sponsoring the DIGNIDAD Act, told the Daily Signal’s Tony Kinnett on Tuesday in an extremely awkward interview.
Stutzman must have forgotten the 2024 election. Mass deportations, reminiscent of President Dwight Eisenhower’s, were one of the marquee promises of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Axios polling published in 2024 revealed the majority of Americans supported mass deportation (including a surprisingly high 41% of Democrats). Stutzman ought to know these things, but instead he has decided to sponsor one of the worst-written pieces of immigration legislation in history.
From Stutzman admitting he knows farmers who are employing illegal aliens under the table to revealing that the author—Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla.—has been lying to the American public about her desire for amnesty, the congressman’s defense of the DIGNIDAD Act proves why it ought to be rejected.
The “party line” on the DIGNIDAD Act from its GOP co-sponsors has been that the bill would not apply to anyone who arrived illegally during the Biden administration. During the interview, Stutzman said several times that this would mean it would apply to approximately 10 million illegal aliens. However, a 2017 MIT study estimated the number of illegal immigrants who arrived between 1990 and 2016 at around 22 million.
The DIGNIDAD Act would grant legal status, therefore, to the vast majority of illegal aliens in the country. It’s worth noting that Salazar has previously said she sees legal status as a first step on the path to citizenship. The bill also specifically states that records of gang membership are not disqualifying for legal status, allows an alien with a single DUI conviction to qualify for legal status, and allows DHS to waive certain grounds for inadmissibility in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Stutzman told Kinnett that he believes the bad provisions in the bill would be stripped in the amendment process. However, if, as he has stated to Kinnett and in other interviews, he is sponsoring this for the registration of the illegals as a national security measure, then the question arises: Why not write a bill that only does that? Why sign onto a bill that the author hopes will lead to citizenship for tens of millions of illegal immigrants?
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At best, the congressman is engaging in an act of supreme legislative malpractice by gambling with mass amnesty. It is hard to pin him down, though.
In a July 2025 interview with WOWO’s Kayla Blakeslee, he said, “[DIGNIDAD] does not limit ICE from doing their jobs.” However, Section 1122 is specifically designated to severely limit enforcement in “sensitive locations.” When Kinnett brought this up, Stutzman didn’t push back at all.
This raises yet another question: Had Stutzman not read this when he signed on and defended it to Blakeslee, or was he knowingly lying?
The DIGNIDAD Act is deeply flawed, setting aside Stutzman’s inconsistent rhetoric defending it.
Salazar’s own duplicitous rhetoric is also worth noting. Despite having stated that she sees legal status as the first step on a path to citizenship, she is now claiming the bill would provide “Dignity not Amnesty.” In fact, at the time of writing, her pinned post on X says just that.
Stutzman, though, outed her. He told Kinnett, “Previous drafts of the bill had citizenship as a part of that, and I told Congresswoman Maria Salazar I absolutely would not sign on to the bill.”
Salazar’s previous statements, and this new revelation, make the slippery slope a very real possibility. As Kinnett pointed out, “We’ve seen this with making drugs that were higher on the schedule list a lot lower because, after all, it’s already been reduced, so why not reduce it even further? We’ve seen it on, carrying out certain sentences for less harsh punishments … Why aren’t we going to see maybe this kind of … permission structure carried on?”
Kinnett’s line of questioning is correct, and frankly you’d have to be dangerously naïve to look at recent history and think anything else will happen.
DIGNIDAD undercuts the mandate on immigration the Trump administration received in 2024. Hopefully, someone can refresh Stutzman’s memory on that.
Kinnett posed a question to Stutzman that all the DIGNIDAD Act’s GOP sponsors need to answer: “Is there a point that it would become so egregious that you would pull sponsorship?”
I doubt it. If the bill’s contents aren’t already egregious enough, it seems that its co-sponsors just don’t care.
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