After Donald Trump divulged plans to round up and deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants (it’s probably thousands), Fox News helpfully promoted it as a righteous idea while overlooking how Trump might have just sabotaged the plan.
The Washington Post explained yesterday, which Fox News’ Your World show did not, how Trump may have undermined the ICE operation:
President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.
In addition to the Trump incompetence and ignorance, there’s the cruelty. In April, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were ousted because they raised concerns about the plan, both as far as the practicality in carrying it out and because of the high risk of children being separated from their parents, The Post also noted.
But when Vitiello appeared on Fox News yesterday, he found nothing not to love about the action.
"It's important to have consequences when people break the law,” Vitiello said. He claimed that 90% of the people due to be rounded up “didn't go to their asylum hearing or to their immigration hearing. They were noticed by ICE to come into the office to try to get right with the process, many of them did not."
"The agency now has to close the loop,” Vitiello continued. “The president is trying to do everything he can to secure the borderland, bring integrity to the immigration system."
As for separating families from children, Vitiello suggested they deserved it. "They've all been offered a chance at due process, many of them neglected to take it, and so now it's time for the enforcement and the integrity for the system to be in place," he said. “They came to the border with their children and were let go because that's the way that laws operationalized. Now there's an opportunity to put consequences with that illegal action, and that's what I believe he's talking about. It needs to be done.”
Media Matters notes that mass deportations would be a dream come true for white nationalists.
But while host Neil Cavuto corrected the number of the potential deportees from millions to thousands, his only real concern seemed to be the practicality of the procedure. He said it “could prove easier said than done,” then asked the Trump-affirming Vitiello how would he accomplish such a “tough task.”
Not surprisingly, Vitiello assured viewers it would be no problem. He called it “part and parcel of what those [ICE] professionals are capable of doing.”
Watch the heartlessness below, from the June 18, 2019 Your World.