Madeleine Albright: 'I Think The Statue Of Liberty Is Weeping'

Madeleine Albright called Ken Cuccinelli’s reinterpretation of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on a plaque attached to the Statue of Liberty “one of the most un-American things I have ever heard.”

“I think the Statue of Liberty is weeping,” the former secretary of state told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday. She wore a pin of Lady Liberty for the interview.

Cuccinelli, the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, drew widespread ire on Tuesday after he defended the Trump administration’s new rule that stops legal immigrants who receive government benefits from becoming permanent citizens by suggesting the poem “The New Colossus” should now read: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

Albright, who sailed into New York harbor as a young immigrant, recalled to Cooper how she’d 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,” she said.

And it was one key difference in attitudes in the two countries that led her father to settle the family in the U.S.:

“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, you’re welcome here and when are you going home?’ And when we came to the United States, people said, ‘We’re so sorry, you’re country’s been taken over by a terrible system, 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.”

Check out the interview here: