Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) believes that the United States government wants to use thousands of undocumented immigrants for medical experiments, she said on the radio show "WallBuilders Live" on Wednesday.
“And now President Obama is trying to bring all those foreign nationals, the illegal aliens to the country, and he has said that he will put them in the foster care system," Bachmann said in the interview. "Well, I will tell you from personal experience, we don’t have enough foster parents now in the country for the kids in America. We certainly don’t have enough foster parents for all of the illegal aliens that the president is trying to bring in right now." The progressive group People For the American Way posted the audio on its Right Wing Watch blog Wednesday afternoon.
Bachmann said that hospitals could "get millions of dollars in government grants if they can conduct medical research on somebody," suggesting that the hospitals could do that research on undocumented children. "A little kid can’t say no if they’re a ward of the state," said Bachmann. "So here you could have this institution getting millions of dollars from our government to do medical experimentation and a kid can’t even say no. It’s sick.”
But Bachmann hasn’t always expressed concern for children who are brought to the U.S. illegally. In 2011, when asked what she would do for the children of undocumented immigrants, Bachmann said she “would not do anything for them.”
"Their parents are the ones who brought them here ... they did not have the legal right to come to the United States," she said in 2011. "We do not owe people who broke our laws to come into the country. We don't owe them anything."
Bachmann, the parent of 23 foster children, made her most recent comments while urging support for a bill she introduced called Justina’s Law, which would prohibit federal funding for “any treatment or research in which a ward of the State is subjected to greater than minimal risk to the individual’s health with no or minimal prospect of direct benefit.”
UPDATE: Dan Kotman, a Bachmann spokesman, sent the following statement to HuffPost on Thursday:
This is a classic case of liberal media outlets once again twisting the Congresswoman’s words. As a foster mom of 23, she has a long track record of standing up for foster children and orphans. Her concern was that our foster care system, which is already short on foster care parents, would not have the capacity to handle this surge of unaccompanied children. And a child without parents to advocate on their behalf could be vulnerable to what Justina Pelletier experienced as a ward of the state, which is why the Congresswoman introduced a bipartisan bill to help protect our most vulnerable. Your sensational headline is a gross misrepresentation of what she actually said and what Justina’s Law actually does.
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