KSHB - Candidate Profile: Emanuel Cleaver

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Americans give Democrats and Republicans in Congress one of its low approval ratings ever - a trend that's not new, according to Gallup polls.

But citizens in Missouri's 5th Congressional District do have high expectations of getting issues addressed in Washington, D.C.

We took their concerns to both candidates for Congress here in Kansas City, starting with incumbent Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

Cleaver has served as congressman for the 5th District since 2005 and is a member of the Democratic Party. In 2010, he became the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Previously, Cleaver was mayor of Kansas City from 1991 to 1999.

If the race between Emanuel Cleaver and his opponent, Jacob Turk, looks familiar, that's because the two have faced each other before. Since the 2006 midterm elections, the two have campaigned to represent the 5th District. Cleaver has won all four elections, receiving 60 percent of the vote in the last election in 2012.

Cleaver sat down with 41 Action News to discuss questions from voters.

Attorney Rekha Sharma-Crawford asked, "Immigrant women and children are being held at the southern border in conditions that have been termed a humanitarian crisis. How does the call to deport them all immediately and without due process support or comport with family and Christian values?"

Cleaver said, "I was fortunate enough to take down to the border last month four other congressional members of the U.S. Congress and we met with five members of the Mexican congress in McAllen, Texas, right on the border. We met at the border. We spent a day touring the facilities and then we met with the individuals running those facilities, including the border guard.

"I think deportation, particularly without going through the judicial system, is improper and should be pushed aside. Set aside. What I think we all agreed on, the 10 members of the U.S. and Mexican congress, is that we ought to set up an immigration center in southern Mexico because many of the people who travel down through what I call the trail of fears are children who come from Central America. And if we had an immigration facility on the border where both Mexico and the U.S. were both able to have things adjudicated there, it would save lives, time and money. I think it is foolish to think we can deport people as an official immigration policy of the United States."

Allan Katz, a UMKC distinguished professor, asked, "Do you think we should have left troops in Iraq even though there was no status of forces agreement which basically is a prerequisite for wherever we put troops in the world? There's been some criticism for having pulled all of our troops out. Would the support leaving our troops in without the protection of a status force agreement which was not being offered by the Iraqi government?"

Cleaver said, "President Malachi never wanted the U.S. to keep troops there. Although it is I think safe to say we were already occupied Iraq to stay there after the government said repeatedly that they did not want U.S. troops there because they felt it was a defamation to Islam. And we were spending an extraordinary amount of money building Iraq, much of which we already destroyed, and to keep troops there would create two problems. One, the enormity of the amount of money we spent would continue to grow, and two, I think we would have eventually created the kind of sentiment that would give some aid to Al-Qaeda, which has essentially been decimated in Iraq."

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