Stephen Colbert called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “evil” on Thursday for enforcing the “tragic” and “shocking” immigration policy of separating illegal border-crossing parents from their children. Colbert called the policy “new” but failed to mention the Obama administration instituted similar enforcement.
“Let’s face it. The only things dads really want for Father’s Day is to be with their kids, which is why what’s happening on our southern border is so shocking,” Colbert’s Late Show monologue began.
“This is the conversation everybody should be having,” he continued. “Attorney General and ‘man daydreaming about legally changing his name to Jim Crow’ Jeff Sessions has instituted a new policy to separate immigrant kids from their parents at the border.”
“Now if that sounds evil, then good news, your ears are working,” Colbert said.
Colbert’s enraged five-minute rant against President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda failed to mention how Barack Obama implemented similar border policies of separating children from their parents and sheltering the minors in separate facilities.
In 2014, when tens of thousands of people poured across the Mexico-U.S. border, Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General at the time, and Senator Ted Cruz slammed the Obama administration’s “lax immigration policy has led to the conditions they saw while touring a holding facility for unaccompanied immigrant minors at the base,” San Antonio Express-News reported:
The children are being temporarily housed at Lackland and facilities in other states to alleviate crowded conditions at federal holding sites on the border.
Cruz said 145,000 unaccompanied minors, mainly from Central America, are expected in the next year — most of whom say they are coming because they were promised “ permisos” — what Cruz calls amnesty. “That is unacceptable,” he said.
Colbert continued to his lecture decrying the Trump’s administration’s plan to build a tent city close to El Paso, Texas, meant to house hundreds of young border crossers.
“It wouldn’t matter if you took these children to really nice hotels—or Trump hotels—we’d still be the only country in the whole damn world doing it, because it’s just plain wrong,” the CBS funnyman said. “I sincerely believe that it doesn’t matter who you voted for,” Colbert concluded. “If we let this happen in our name, we are a feckless… country.”
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson
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