As Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney appeared as a guest on Tuesday's New Day, CNN host Chris Cuomo repeatedly lobbied for DACA to be extended to help illegal immigrants without tying it to improving border security, even as his GOP guest repeatedly made the argument against doing so.
Early on, Cuomo suggested that illegal immigrants were in danger of being treated like "dogs" as he defended the Democratic decision to shut down the government over the program: "And here you had the Democrats saying that Dreamers don't deserve to be treated like dogs and thrown out of the country, and they were standing firm on that. Don't you respect that?"
After Mulvaney argued that, by legalizing DACA recipients without getting Democrats to support greater border security, there would be a risk that the same problem would develop again over the next 20 years, Cuomo persisted in pushing the left-leaning point-of-view: "Dreamers are human beings, and the idea that he was generous or as loving ... as warranted by what he gets in return, does not seem like love to me."
After Mulvaney repeated his argument in favor of tying DACA to border security, the CNN host persisted:
But it's an effective way to help the Dreamers, and he called it a bill of love. None of that other stuff is about love -- it's about security, and there are things that are important, but not the same as giving dignity to these human beings who were brought in as children who he says he cares about.
As Cuomo tried to push a study by the left-wing Center for American Progress arguing that it would cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars if DACA recipients were deported, leading Mulvaney to scoff at his use of a liberal group as his source, the CNN host dismissed illegal immigration as an "imaginary crisis."
