Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner seemingly embraced her colleague Tucker Carlson’s widely condemned claim that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier,” telling Fox viewers on Tuesday that migrants at the southern border “make our country look like what they left” and “our people” are now forced to clean up their “excrement.”
Carlson, before overtly endorsing the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, sparked intense backlash and prompted advertisers to flee his primetime program in late 2018 over his bigoted comments.
“Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this,” the Fox News star exclaimed at the time. “We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
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Carlson defended his remarks and Fox News stood by its host, claiming the criticism against him was “an effort to stifle free speech.” Since then, his anti-immigration rhetoric has grown only more strident, the network has obsessively focused on “illegal immigrants,” and the network’s hosts and commentators have gone through multiple cycles of railing against “migrant caravans” and the “invasion” at the southern border.
Furthermore, Fox stars have brazenly pushed the “Great Replacement” theory, which is the racist notion that liberals are replacing white voters in Western countries with compliant non-white migrants. Faulkner herself took umbrage when a guest called out Fox earlier this year for “spewing” the theory and noting the Buffalo mass shooting had been inspired by it.
Teasing an upcoming segment on the Department of Homeland Security seeking volunteers to assist with the influx of asylum-seeking migrants at the border, Faulkner—who has long been touted by Fox News as a valued member of their vaunted “straight news” division—echoed Carlson’s well-worn talking points.
“The fallout over the bombshell report on the DHS asking for military volunteers to do chores for people who’ve shown up at our border, including picking up the garbage after them,” she said on Tuesday’s broadcast of The Faulkner Focus.
“Now, I’ve shown you on this very program an exclusive video that they leave a trail of unspeakables from the river’s edge until they can enter some place illegally, where there are no Border Patrol, nobody there to stop them,” Faulkner added. “Some sensors that are very, very slow to respond because there are so many of them.”
She concluded: “They make our country look like what they left! And now our people are going to be picking up all that trash and all that excrement. It’s in Focus.”
Her remarks, meanwhile, prompted some left-leaning journalists and observers to liken her comments to “Nazi stuff.” Additionally, former U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain J. Adam Ereli, who served in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said this was “straight-up racism” by the network.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
