If there is something that shouldn’t be a partisan issue, it is having effective border security and detaining immigrants that illegally cross our border. For the left, however, it has become a question as to whether the U.S. should have a border at all, along with a concerted attempt by Democrats and their media allies to paint the brave men and women of Border Patrol as Nazis.
On Tuesday's edition of Morning Joe, co-host Joe Scarborough compared the treatment of detained migrants who crossed illegally to the treatment of terrorists by the U.S. military:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I remember back 2005, 2006, when stories broke about how the United States and our allies were treating terrorists—KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Yeah.SCARBOROUGH: — suspected terrorists that we captured and you'd read stories about how they'd make them stand up sleeping. They would keep lights on 24 hours a day to disorient them —MIKA BRZEZINSKI: And there was debate.
SCARBOROUGH — have them live in squalid conditions, crowded conditions, to break them mentally so they would sit down and start talking to our interrogators. We are now doing that to five, six, seven-year-old children, 10-year-old children, who let me say again for the ignorant, for the ignorant, are coming here — many of them with their parents legally to seek refugee status. That is not illegal. That is a legal action and for taking that legal action, Karine, again, it sounds like a lot they're suspected terrorists being interrogated at Gitmo.
Another disgusting smear from Scarborough of the agents that do everything in their power to keep our border safe. As NewsBusters has reported, migrant detention centers have been overwhelmed by an increase of families crossing the border illegally. The facilities were not designed to care for children over long periods of time and CBP's pleas for additional funding from Congress were consistently ignored until the recent passage of a $4.5 billion aid package.
As NewsBusters has previously reported here, here, and here, Morning Joe has consistently mislead their viewers about the situation at the border. Scarborough once said that Americans are “stupid” to believe there is a crisis at the border and then went on to recently blame the administration for the inhumane conditions faced by illegal immigrants in overwhelmed migrant detention centers.
Going back to Tuesday, Scarborough also lied about the types of people in detention centers. They're migrants who decided to break the law and cross the border illegally instead of seeking asylum through a port of entry. Crossing the border illegally is a violation of 8 U.S. Code § 1325; crossing through a port of entry is not. DHS statistics also show that 80 percent of asylum cases at the southwest border are illegitimate.
But don’t expect facts to get in the way of a good narrative for Joe Scarborough.
The full transcript is below. Click "expand" to read more.
The full transcript is below. Click "expand" to read more.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
07/23/2019
6:45:41 a.m. Eastern
2 minutes and 27 seconds
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You have agents of course, Mika, that have been caught having Facebook pages mocking and ridiculing those they're taking care of, making — actually printing coins, you know, mocking and ridiculing these children who are being abused and Karine, I remember back 2005, 2006, when stories broke about how the United States and our allies were treating terrorists —
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: — suspected terrorists that we captured and you'd read stories about how they'd make them stand up sleeping. They would keep lights on 24 hours a day to disorient them —
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: And there was debate.
SCARBOROUGH — have them live in squalid conditions, crowded conditions, to break them mentally so they would sit down and start talking to our interrogators. We are now doing that to five, six, seven-year-old children, 10-year-old children, who let me say again for the ignorant, for the ignorant, are coming here — many of them with their parents legally to seek refugee status. That is not illegal. That is a legal action and for taking that legal action, Karine, again, it sounds like a lot they're suspected terrorists being interrogated at Gitmo.
JEAN-PIERRE: That's exactly right, Joe. It’s just what Mika said, it’s torture. We are torturing the five, six-year-olds, these babies, and just one other story — just one more story of the inhumane kind of nature and treatment by this administration, you know what this reminds me of too, just listening to you talking, Joe? It reminds me of Oscar and his 23-month-old young daughter Valeria,
BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
JEAN-PIERRE: — who we saw face down in the water. The Rio — crossing the Rio Grande because they the story is they were denied — they were trying to seek asylum and were denied at the border and they took extreme circumstances to try to get here for a better life and this is how we're treating people, kids, children, and so here's the thing, Joe, I think that Democrats should not be doing deals with Donald Trump and this administration. They should be using this. They should be trying to figure out how do they fix this, how do they stop this. We can't keep seeing this type of torturous type of behavior and treatment and also just more deaths, so we — they need to stand up because Republicans in Congress are just not going to do it.
