On Tuesday's The Situation Room, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin likened President Donald Trump enforcing immigration law by separating families to both a bank robbery and to Hurricane Katrina as the group discussed HHS Secretary Alex Alzar defending the administration's progress in reuniting children with their parents.
And CNN analyst Jackie Kucinich displayed the latest example of CNN conflating legal asylum seekers with illegal immigrants who cross the border illegally and seek asylum after they are apprehended as she complained about some asylum seekers being separated from their children.
Host Wolf Blitzer asked for the group's reaction to his interview with Alzar in which the HHS Secretary pointed out that the administration's efforts had found that some of the alleged parents were either not the real parents, or had committed crimes, leading Kucinich to dismissively declare that "I guess they had to say something." She then added:
What he didn't mention was the fact that they are separating children from parents who are asylum seekers. That's legal -- that's how people come to this country, and they apply for asylum, and those parents are being separated from those children. He has not addressed that, and the administration should.
When he got his turn, Toobin trashed the administration as he began:
The whole thing reminded me of a bank robber saying, "I am working so hard to give the money back, and I'm trying to collect it." Don't rob the bank in the first place. I mean, don't separate the children so you have to work so hard to get them back together.
He then repeated an analogy that he and other CNN regulars have made before as he likened the Trump administration's handling of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents to Hurricane Katrina:
Sometimes people talk about this as if it's like Hurricane Katrina which was sort of the beginning of the end of the George W. Bush presidency. But that was an act of God. That was something that -- it was a terrible response, but George W. Bush didn't start the rain in New Orleans .This is a completely Trump administration-created crisis.
Over the past couple of weeks, Toobin has made the Katrina analogy several times, with other CNN regulars like John Berman and David Gergen also doing so. On June, 20, Berman declared: "People call this Trump's Katrina. It strikes me, the difference between Katrina and this, is George W. Bush didn't make it rain, right? President Trump made it rain here."
On June 21, Toobin similarly proclaimed: "This is Donald Trump's Katrina, you know, a turning point in how he's portrayed. But, in many respects, this is worse than Katrina because George W. Bush didn't create the hurricane -- he didn't make it rain. … There was no reason for these kids to be separated from their parents."
