Monday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham used her show-opening monologue to criticize the “outrage” from opponents of the detention of children who were separated from their parents for crossing the border illegally.
Ingraham likened the detention facilities to “summer camps,” and noted others in the media had likened them to boarding schools.
Transcript as follows:
INGRAHAM: Every country has an obligation to protect its borders and its citizens, particularly one as expansive and as generous as the United States. Now for too long, immigration law was ignored, frankly, and basically unenforced. Obama tried to enforce it in an ad-hoc fashion, but its policies, which we are going to get to in a moment, only ended up exacerbating our problems at the border. So today we have a full-on crisis, 160 percent increase in the number of people illegally entering the United States from just last year. Well, the President is responding with a zero-tolerance message which he reiterated today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee holding facility, it won’t be. You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States, not on my watch.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now the President is now doing what we should have been doing all along, prosecuting all border crashers. So if you enter the country illegally, you’re breaking the law. The United States is not a repatriation center where any indigent person in the world feels free to just walk in and assume that all of us will take care of all of them and their families. There’s a process and it has to be respected. Homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen said this today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KIRSTJEN NIELSON, SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: We are a compassionate country that has taken in millions of refugees. Since 1975, the United States has welcomed in more than three million refugees from all over the world, and each year, typically admit nearly two thirds of the world’s settled refugees. That is more than all other countries combined. We will not apologize for the job we do or the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do. Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Well consistent with American law, when a party is arrested, your children are either sent to relatives or they become wards of the state. So since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps or as the San Diego Union-Tribune described them today, is looking like, basically, boarding schools. Having lost the argument and frankly, the last election, Liberals have seized on the separated children and turned the entire image into a political weapon, attempting to emotionally manipulate the public perception of immigration enforcement.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN HOST: I’ve read that you said the separation, in your words, is nothing less than government-sanctioned child abuse. Do you really think that this amounts to child abuse?
DR COLLEEN KRAFT, PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS: This does amount to child abuse.
GAYLE KING, CBS ANCHOR: And all I can say after talking with the people, watching the people, listening to the people is the statue of liberty is weeping right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have effectively orphaned thousands of children, taking them from their parents.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC HOST: I’m heartbroken by what’s happening, and I wonder what this means for the fabric of our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now why are all their hearts breaking in unison now? Why no tears for the victims of illegal immigrant crimes? Like the 14-year-old girl raped by Anastacio Eugenio Lopez Fabian, just last month? Or did their heartbreak when another 14- year-old was left to die at the scene of a hit and run by Miguel Ibarra Cerda, a 21-year-old Mexican national? My friends, here’s what you’re not haring. The government has very good reasons for separating children from their family unit. The first being they may not be the child’s family at all. Children have been kidnapped, trafficked and used by individuals who can then more easily slip into the country. The Obama administration’s catch and release policy allowed people with children to enter the United States with only a promise to show up for a later hearing. A lot of them didn’t show up of course. The human traffickers and the drug cartels quickly seized on the weakness and exploited it, routinely trafficking people across the border using children, at times, as camouflage. Then when Obama announced his DACA policy in 2012, it became yet another lure for illegal immigrants. ‘The number of unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, surged between 2012 and 2014 by, check this out, by more than 400 percent’. The number of unaccompanied children referred to the office of refugee resettlement tripled between 2012 and 2017 from 13,625 to 40,810 according to the government’s statistics. From these immigrants come fresh recruits for MS13 and other gangs that terrorize Americans cities from Maryland to California. We’ve talked to the officials who told us the stories. And in June of 2014, even the Washington Post had to admit that the unaccompanied minor surge was ‘Driven in large Part by the perception that they will be allowed to stay under the Obama administration’s immigration policies.’
Astoundingly, in the fiscal year 2104, the border patrol apprehended 68,445 ‘family units’. Few, of course, were deported. Now you throw in Sanctuary Cities, a lax amnesty program, and it’s a wonder more illegals haven’t come. So the Trump administration in now trying to pick up the pieces of this lawless immigration system after decades of governmental neglect. They are also trying to respectfully protect children in the government’s care. Here are the circumstances where they temporarily take custody of children. Number one. When DHS is unable to verify the relationship between the adult and the child. Number two, when DHS determines that a child may be at risk with the parent or the legal guardian. And three, when the parent or legal guardian is referred for criminal prosecution. Now, you enter into a normal port of entry rather than coming across the border illegally, and the chances are you’re not going to be separated from your families. But most of these people are coming straight across the border as illegal immigrants and claiming some type of status or asylum request. And this all goes back to a 1997 court ruling we’ve talked about before on the show called the Flora Settlement which forbade the government from holding unaccompanied children for more than 20 days, did also those traveling with family units. So unless you have a hearing within 20 days, they have to be released into the country. Okay unless you’ve been swayed by the media reports that children are housed in concentration camps or cages, the truth is the US taxpayer is paying a lot on the care of these children, nearly $35,000 per year, per child. They actually have a higher standard of living than the 13 million American children today, currently living below the poverty line, which is about $24,000 per household. And as for the conditions of the facilities that the immigrants children are housed in? They live a lot better than some inner-city kids or say 11,472 homeless veterans living here in California.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC HOST: Anything we’ve seen the government has provided, this doesn’t feel like we’re in the United States.
JACOB SOBOROFF, MSNBC HOST: Department of Health and Human Services invited us inside because I think they wanted to show us, relatively speaking, how good the conditions are, I guess you could say. I mean there are licensed professionals in there that are taking care of the children. They are not cages. They are not fences.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: It’s just ridiculous, I mean the bottom line is these kids should be united with their parents, reunited with their parents, back in their home countries. They should not be burdens to the United States taxpayer or thrown into a system of foster care with parents who think coming across the border with children will just assure them eventual legalized status. The President wants the separation to end as well.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEFF SESSIONS, ATTORNEY GENERAL: President Trump has said this lawlessness cannot continue. We do not want to separate parents from their children. You can be sure of that. If we build a law, we pass some legislation. We close some loopholes, we will face these terrible choices.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: And rather than trying to score political points, Democrats and Republicans, like Sessions is indicating, should come together. They should do what’s best for the country, for the American citizen and the American workers and these immigrant children. The law should be changed so that the border control can turn away individuals and family units at the border, if necessary. Today, only Mexicans who cross the border illegally can be turned back, that’s absurd. Our border patrol doesn’t exist as a wave in a facilitator for any group of supposed family members who mouth the script given to them by lawyers, non- governmental institutions or other people in their home countries, that they mouth for asylum. The American people are footing a really big bill for what is tantamount to a slow rolling invasion of the United States. And we can no longer permit Central American countries to export their poverty and their desperation to our nation. Our own children black, white, Asian and Latino, need help too. In Detroit, here in LA, in Hartford, in Miami, and in Chicago. So why don’t the Bushes and the Obamas and all these left-wing reporters emoting today at the White House and all these pro-amnesty Democrats and Republicans, why don’t they ever write op-eds or cry for those kids? You know why? Because they think this over-the-top coverage in a misrepresentation of what’s going on will hurt the man that they could not beat in November 2016, Donald Trump. And that’s ‘The Angle.’
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