On Tuesday's Cuomo Prime Time, liberal host Chris Cuomo got into a heated debate with conservative contributor Steve Cortes as the two discussed the immigration issue and President Donald Trump's recent rally in New Mexico in which the President joked with supporter Cortes about his Hispanic ancestry.
After Cortes called out Cuomo, and presumably others on CNN, for their history of misleadingly conflating legal immigrants with illegal immigrants, Cuomo denied doing so, in spite of all the evidence NewsBusters has documented since last year that his network has done so over and over and over again..
Additionally, Cuomo snidely charged that Trump's supporters "drag Kate Steinle's family" around the country to portray illegal immigrants as criminals, as he hinted that Steine's case is used because she is white. NewsBusters has caught Cuomo doing this before, and pointed out that President Trump has a history of highlighting victims of different races who have been targeted by criminal aliens.
At 9:16 p.m. Eastern, Cuomo posed: "How can the Latino community believe that he loves them when he has said so many anti-Mexican and even anti-Puerto Rican things -- how can he love Latinos when he has shown such animosity?"
A bit later, he similarly ranted:
When you are a member of a group that has been denigrated time and time again, this many described the caravans coming her as being mostly murderers and rapists, and 'some, I assume, are good people,' and all the stuff about teh s-hole countries, and what he said about Puerto Rico and treating them like they weren't even part of the country. You can't forget that stuff if you're in that community. And you know it's reflected in his numbers. ... He's got a third of them at best.
After Cortes declared that the numbers are "incredible compared to expectations," Cuomo shot back: "For somebody who says bigoted things about them all the time, maybe."
Cortes called Cuomo's claim "fake news," leading the CNN host to snap that his guest was engaging in "crock talk."
Cuomo asserted that Trump "has depicted the people who are coming to the border as savages who are bombarding the gate," leading Cortes to respond, "Some of them are."
The CNN host then bristled as he complained that Cortes and Trump should spend more time discussing better behaved immigrants: "Overwhelmingly they are not. Why don't you talk about the majority instead of the smaller slice. Why do you try to depict an entire population by the few and not the many?"
After Cortes denied doing so, Cuomo got huffy as he shot back: "You just did. You just did, brother. You just did."
As Cortes argued that President Trump wants to help Hispanic-Americans, who are disproportionately more victimized by illegal immigrants both in crime and economically, Cuomo brought up Kate Steinle as he obnoxiously responded:
So he's worried about that? That's why he hires illegal workers and doesn't tell the truth about it, and that's why you guys drag Katie (sic) Steinle's family all over this country as an example of who we're trying to protect from these marauders at the gate because he's worried about the impact on the Latino community?
After Cortes recalled the case of Sandra Duran, who was a Hispanic woman killed by an illegal alien, Cuomo made a lame suggestion that Republicans should try to reduce poverty in order to reduce crime instead of increasing border security. Here's Cuomo:
If you are so worried about preventable deaths, then you would attack poverty the way you would the southern border because those are the most preventable homicides we have -- people we have who, in a fit of desperation do stupid and even evil things as a product of it, but that's not what you guys talk about.
After his Republican guest predicted that Hispanics will vote for Trump in surprisingly high numbers, Cuomo shot back: "Why? Is he going to stop talking about them this way? Is he going to stop separating kids at the border?"
In fact, since last year, the policy on separating children from their parents at the border has been the same policy used by the Barack Obama administration.
After Cuomo claimed that Trump makes the word "immigration" out to be a "dirty word," Cortes soon complained about CNN misleadingly lumping legal and illegal immigration together: "When it comes to immigration, you and a lot of folks in the mainstream media constantly try to conflate illegal immigration and legal immigration together, and they have nothing to do with each other."
Cuomo denied his own culpability as he responded, "Never. Never," and then pivoted to complaining about the Trump administration pushing to reduce legal immigration, as if that somehow disproved CNN's history of treating legal immigrants and illegal immigrants as if they were interchangeable during discussions of border security.
