An irritated Chris Cuomo on Wednesday bizarrely scoffed at the idea that keeping the illegal immigrant killer of Kate Steinle out of the country would have saved the young woman’s life. Cuomo also derided talking in a way that painted Jose Ines Garcia Zarate and others as monsters. While discussing Trump administration efforts to thwart illegal immigration, Cuomo complained: “But Kate Steinle has always been a gross misappropriation of the tragedy that ended her life. It doesn't meet with the facts of the situation.”
He then ridiculously insisted: “The facts of what happened to Katie Steinle only make sense on one level, which is ‘but for.’ But for that guy being in the country, when he shouldn't have been, she would have never died.”
How’s that work? If Garcia Zarate wasn’t illegally in the U.S., how could he have killed Steinle? After all, this is a man who had been deported five times Cuomo didn’t explain his logic and no one on the show pressed him to do so.
In fact, even the liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein disagrees with Cuomo. She wrote a letter in 2015 saying: “The tragic death of Ms. Steinle could have been avoided if the Sheriff's Department had notified ICE prior to the release of Mr. Sanchez [Zarate], which would have allowed ICE to remove him from the country.”
What really bothered Cuomo is the fact that this man is used as an argument against illegal immigration. The CNN anchor attacked “the idea of what he was painted as, there is a monster in our midst and so many just like him, the facts don't line up on it. And it’s always been a gross abuse of the situation.”
In January, Cuomo attacked the Trump administration for painting illegals as “monsters.”
A partial transcript is below. Click “expand” for more:
New Day
5/16/18
6:21am ET[Clip of Fox News.]
KRISTJEN NIELSEN (Secretary of Homeland Security) : It is the law, as you know. I had an exchange last week with a different senator that tried to cut me off and said, “Well, I know this is your philosophy.” And I said, “It’s not a philosophy, it’s the law.” If you enter the country illegally, we will refer you for prosecution and we will prosecute you. But as you know, for every sob story, we have 73 percent border increase. We have people like Kate Steinle. I mean, where is the compassion for the flip side of this conversation?
[Clip ends]
JOHN AVLON: I think a conversation about compassion that is predicated on defending separating children from their parents and putting them on military base is fundamentally flawed. Are you trying to be a dystopian Disney character? I mean, right now there is a capacity for 10,500 children on this military base. Now, if there are 20 kids in a kindergarten classroom, that's 500 kindergarten class being pleased policed by soldiers. For a party that allegedly believes that government doesn’t do a lot right, having soldiers babysit children separated from their parents probably not the best moment in our history.
...
AVLON: But drill down on the question of whether parents and children should be separated at the border. Attorney General Sessions is arguing specifically this is intended as a deterrent. Parents don't cross over. We’re going to charge you with child trafficking. That should be a deterrent. But then you have the additional responsibility to start separating children from their parents and that’s not what America stands for.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: I reject the notion that you, if you don’t— if you care about these children, you don’t care about Kate Steinle. No. We are actually capable of having the compassion for both.
JOHN AVLON: Yes. Of course.
CUOMO: But Kate Steinle has always been a gross misappropriation of the tragedy that ended her life. It doesn't meet with the facts of the situation. The facts of what happened to Katie Steinle only make sense on one level, which is “but for.” But for that guy being in the country, when he shouldn't have been, she would have never died. But the facts of it, he was not — you know — the idea of what he was painted as, there is a monster in our midst and so many just like him, the facts don't line up on it. And it’s always been a gross abuse of the situation.
