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‘I Think The Statue Of Liberty Is Weeping’: Madeleine Albright Attacks Cuccinelli

Virginia Kruta Associate Editor
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“I think the Statue of Liberty is weeping,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, arguing that recent comments from acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli were “un-American.”

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Albright, who came to the U.S. as a refugee herself, was responding to Cuccinelli’s defense of stricter immigration controls that would deny green cards to immigrants who couldn’t “stand on their own two feet.” (RELATED: Madeleine Albright Invokes Nazism As Warning About Where America Could Go Under Trump)

“I’ve been a refugee twice, once from the Nazis and we were in England, and then we came to the United States when the communists took over in Czechoslovakia,” Albright told Cooper. “And I think that it is one of the most un-American things I’ve ever heard.”

Albright said that she remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty when she first reached America, adding, “And my father used to say that when we were in England people would say, ‘we’re so sorry your country has been taken over by a terrible dictator.’ And people in the United States said, ‘we’re so sorry, you’re welcome here and when will you become a citizen?’ And my father said that’s what made America a different country. And now we are forgetting that great history of our country.”

Cooper then pointed out that the law Cuccinelli cited as a basis for the current policy was over a century old and had been in effect for decades — but then argued, “Just because something is part of American heritage doesn’t make it right.”

Albright agreed, concluding, “I think this country has benefitted by the diversity that has come through immigration. And so I find that one of the most un-American statements I’ve ever heard and you pointed out that I have a Statue of Liberty pin on. I think the Statue of Liberty is weeping.”