Fox News Co-Host: Jeff Sessions' Immigration Crackdown “Sounded A Lot Like Fugitive Slave Laws To Me”

Co-Host Sandra Smith Responds: Trump's “Base Probably Sees This As Him Following Through On His Campaign Promises”

From the April 12 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered:

Video file

MEGHAN MCCAIN: Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaling an immigration crackdown while speaking in Arizona near our border with Mexico yesterday. Sessions says he's ordering federal prosecutors to reprioritize certain immigration-related offenses, including transporting or harboring illegal immigrants, illegally entering  or reentering the country, assaulting immigration enforcement agents, and possibly charging some immigrants with aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year prison term. Sessions warning those crossing into the country illegally this is now the Trump era.

[...]

GERALDO RIVERA: I don't mind the tough talk, because it has deterred people trying the southern border, and I think that's a good thing because it's so dangerous for them. To stabilize the border is a good thing. But I am absolutely deeply hurt and offended by the tone of this language. This attorney general by using words like filth to describe the undocumented immigrants coming across the southern border, it smacks of a racist tint to me that I find repulsive. I think that the whole notion that they are possibly going to charge and arrest American citizens who harbor undocumented immigrants, for God's sake, what does that mean? Does that mean you arrest the mother and the citizen mother and the citizen children because the dad is an undocumented immigrant? To me it is -- I don't mind harsh and businesslike, but when it becomes, almost hate-filled, I think that it sends a message to the world that is absolutely unnecessary and inhumane in many ways. And I know I'm in the minority around here. Believe me. 

EBONI WILLIAMS: I'm just going to speak from my heart. Hearing it, Geraldo, it sounded a lot like fugitive slave laws to me, quite frankly. That spirit of the harboring and abetting, the hyper-criminalizing of some of this behavior. Again, it's different than what I heard on the campaign stump. It's different from if you happen to be here illegally and you're convicted of, or have committed felonies, or dangerous crimes, things like this, go after those people. They need to get out of our country, absolutely. But this is a different tone a different tenor. I believe in a sovereign state and a stable border, we do not have that, we need to enforce that, absolutely, but I don't think this is the way to go about it.

SANDRA SMITH: But his base probably sees this as him following through on his campaign promises, and he did promise it over and over again.

RIVERA: What happened to the targeting of the drug cartels, what happened to the gangbangers? I can take Jeff Sessions. I remember when Rudy Giuliani first got the job as U.S. Attorney in southern district, I said do you understand how Wall Street is dealing heroin right now? I took Rudy Giuliani down to Wall Street and he saw the lines of people waiting to buy heroin. I want to take Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the gangbanger centers in east L.A., or in Brentwood, Long Island, I'll show him the MS-13, is show him the this and the that. I know who the gangbangers are. You can't tell me that the feds don't know who the really bad people are. They have tattoos all over their necks, and teardrops for killing people. Why you going to go after Juan and Maria, the apricot picker? How does that make America safer? 

HARRIS FAULKNER: You know, it's interesting, I had not heard anybody put it in the familial way like you did. Would you have a wife and child turn on the illegal father, that's an interesting perspective, but you cannot get away from that if you are here illegally that's the initial crime. 

Previously

“Great News!”: White Nationalists See Sessions’ Attorney General Confirmation As Major Step Toward Achieving Their Racist Goals

White Nationalists And Nativists Want Americans To Pay To Keep America White

Trump's Immigration Policies Come From This Nativist Group's Wish List