It’s not just Donald Trump’s nominees who are staking out daylight from his campaign rhetoric. Paul Ryan took part in a CNN town hall last night hosted by Jake Tapper, and took a question from a young woman who wondered, “Do you think I should be deported?” Ryan explained that Congress was not about to authorize mass deportations, and that the Trump administration wasn’t asking for one, either (via Leah Barkoukis):

Paul Ryan tells an undocumented immigrant he doesn't want to deport her https://t.co/D5vYCfSC0K https://t.co/ntZAjxYQLY

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 13, 2017

“What we have to do is find a way to make sure that you can get right with the law,” Ryan told the questioner, “and we’ve got to do this in a good way so that the rug doesn’t get pulled out from under you and your family gets separated. I think we have to come up with a solution for the DACA kids. And that’s something we in Congress and the Trump transition team are working on,” he said. “What’s a good humane solution.”

As seen in the clip above, Ryan tells Tapper that Barack Obama created a huge problem with his overreach of executive authority. Congress and the White House now have to unwind that problem while coming up with a “humane” solution that still respects the rule of law.

Interestingly, this was also a topic of today’s Q-poll, which I covered earlier. When presented with three options for current illegal immigrants in the US, 59% chose to give them a path to citizenship, 9% to have them stay without a path to citizenship, and only 25% wanted them ejected. Even among Republicans, more wanted them to stay (48% combined) than to leave (44%), and that was by far the most hostile demographic in the poll. That’s another big reason why Congress isn’t about to authorize mass deportations, along with the sheer logistical and fiscal impossibility of it.

Ryan took a more consistent stand with Trump’s campaign rhetoric on so-called sanctuary cities. They are “a violation of the rule of law,” Ryan emphasized, which ties back to his point on DACA:

Paul Ryan: "Sanctuary cities are a violation of the rule of law, and they are not to be tolerated" #RyanTownHall https://t.co/gG3vQAJR0d

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 13, 2017

The rational approach is to restore the rule of law across the board, and then handle those here in a manner that doesn’t undermine it but deals with the political failures of the past three decades rationally as well.