If you thought Kirstjen Nielsen’s defense of the Trump’s administration’s policy that separates immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was disturbing, wait until you see what Laura Ingraham had in store for her Fox News viewers on Monday night.
“Consistent with American law, when a party is arrested, your children are either sent to relatives or they become wards of the state,” Ingraham said. “So since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents, and are temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps.”
The host did not show any images of children being held in cages, nor did she play audio of them screaming for their parents in agony as border agents callously joked, “We have an orchestra here.”
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Instead, Ingraham channeled Ann Coulter when she used air quotes around the words “separated children” and attacked Democrats for supposedly feigning outrage in an attempt to “emotionally manipulate” the public for political gain.
Things only grew stranger when Ingraham welcomed the policy’s most prominent proponent, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on her show to defend the policy as totally different from Nazi concentration camps.
“Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course,” Sessions said. “In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.”
In fact, in the years before Nazis set up concentration camps to exterminate Jews, they routinely deported them from what was known then as they Greater German Reich.
Asked by Ingraham if the administration is using this policy as a “deterrent,” Sessions added, “I see that the fact that no one was being prosecuted for this as a factor in a fivefold increase in four years in this kind of illegal immigration. So, yes, hopefully people will get the message and come through the border at the port of entry, and not break across the border unlawfully.”
By the end of her show Monday night, Ingraham had evidently caught wind that some viewers were unhappy with her use of the term “summer camps” to describe the detention centers where many immigrant children are being held in what are “essentially” cages. So she offered up this non-apology.
“Apparently there are a lot of people very upset because we referred to some of the detention facilities tonight as essentially like summer camps,” Ingraham said. “The San Diego Union Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like what you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools.”
Then she changed the subject: “And I suggest that a lot of the folks who are worried about that spend more time in Central America. I have. And we should make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids who are true candidates for adoption because our policies don’t allow that. So let’s put our hearts out there for the kids in the right way. Take care of them the right way. Open your hearts and your homes to them.”
