Speaking at the Colorado Capitol last week, State Sen. Mark Baisley (R-Woodland Park) blamed protesters for the violence in Minneapolis, calling it a “horrible idea” for protesters to “get involved in legal law-enforcement activity.”
“It endangers those people,” said Baisley from the Senate floor. “It endangers the agents who are trying to carry out the lawful orders to remove violent people from the United States.”
“We want to keep the number of immigrants low enough so that those folks will assimilate into our culture, more than they will bring the richness of their culture,” continued Baisley.
A few days later, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) posted a video of Baisley’s comments on X with the comment, “American citizens shot dead. A five-year-old separated from his family and taken into custody. Masked officers tossing people into unmarked cars without due process. And you’re instead going after peaceful protestors and our immigrant communities??”
Asked on KHOW radio Feb. 2 to respond to Hickenlooper, Baisley said ICE didn’t arrest the 5-year-old boy, but “effectively rescued” him.
“As I understand it, the ICE agents effectively rescued that abandoned five-year-old boy, took him to his home to go hand him over to his mother, who would not open the door. So what do you do? You take care of a child like that. And they did, and they did absolutely,” said Baisley.
As a factual matter, the child was arrested by ICE after his father fled.
The child’s mother, who is pregnant and had other children in the house when ICE arrived with her son, told Telemundo she feared agents would arrest her if she opened the door. “They used my boy as bait,” NBC News reported.
Baisley’s statement about limiting immigration in order to prevent cultural change in the U.S. isn’t the first time he’s expressed concern about migrants from other countries. In 2021, Baisley told the Colorado Times Recorder that his statement “we have allowed the weeds to overwhelm the garden was not a reference to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, but rather that “these are people responding to President Biden’s invitation of coming to America in droves in order to become dependent on government largess and vote for more of the same; the destructive culture of socialism.”
Baisley faces former state Rep. Janak Joshi and retired Colonel George Markert in a GOP Senate primary, the winner of which will face the top vote getter in the Democratic primary, which features Hickenlooper, State Sen. Julie Gonzales (D-Denver), and others. Last month, Baisley switched from the gubernatorial to the Senate race.
