Kris Kobach seems to relish the thought of deporting the 800,000 DACA recipients, the so-called Dreamers, who came to this country as children and maybe their parents, too. Perhaps even worse, his cruelty was enthusiastically received by Fox’s Abby Huntsman.
Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, has already proven himself a nativist extremist who has been working hard to disenfranchise voters. But, during a break from preventing people from participating in democracy, Kobach visited Fox & Friends this morning to advocate for mass deportations.
Of course, Kobach got a warm welcome from Fox & Friends cohost Abby Huntsman. He smirked his way through a call for ending DACA. She all but applauded Donald Trump’s upcoming decision to do so. "This whole mentality of America first,” she said admiringly, got his base "riled up" during the campaign.
Huntsman offered some pushback. But Kobach’s response, with more smug smiles, was nothing less than horrifying. Rather than challenge him, she validated the callousness by baselessly suggesting that if DACA is not ended, we’ll be flooded with immigrant children.
HUNTSMAN: There’s also the emotional side, right? What do you do about the people that are already here, the 800,000 Dreamers. What do you do about separating families? Not everyone here is a criminal, a lot of them are just innocents, they’ve been living here most of, all of their life really, they’ve gone to school here. How do you balance the emotional side of this?”
KOBACH: Let’s remember… the average age, the median age is 25 of a DACA illegal alien, and they can be up to 36 years old and still be getting the amnesty ,and they claim to have come in before the age of 16. So first of all, they’re not children. Secondly, if we’re worried about keeping families together, then the illegal alien parents who brought them here should also be removed to the home country along with the DACA recipient alien. There’s nothing wrong with asking people to go home, and if they’ve been able to violate our laws for 10 years or more, well, congratulations, you got a huge benefit from the American taxpayer. You got the best high school education in the Western Hemisphere, but now it’s time to go home, and if you want, get in line and try to come in legally with those hundreds of thousands of your fellow countrymen who are waiting to do it the right way.
HUNTSMAN: Yeah, because what’s going to stop them, parents from just coming over here to leave their children in the United States to have a much better life.
Huntsman closed with a stamp of approval: “It’s really good to have you here, Secretary Kobach, great to see you here,” she gushed.
Watch it below, from the September 5, 2017 Fox & Friends.
We should also note that Kobach is using an identical talking point set to racist ideologues like Mark Krikorian on Tucker Carlson’s show in the evening. The first thing they do is echo the false narrative voiced by Jeff Sessions in the morning. They start with the fiction that President Obama’s executive action was “illegal amnesty”, which it was not. (And they ignore that the GOP had sworn to block every single thing President Obama did, and repeatedly blocked every attempt by the Dems to get something through Congress on this issue, before and after DACA was enacted.)
And that’s Kobach’s approach. It’s not based on legality. (DACA could be defended in court, but Sessions can’t be bothered – particularly since he’s personally opposed to the concept anyway.) It’s based on hatred. And there really isn’t another accurate way to describe it.
One other thing: The next time some angry, frothing Right Winger challenges you on this, saying that President Obama had no right to take this action without Congress, even on a temporary basis, you could answer that the Right had no problems with multiple executive actions and “signing statements” made by George W. Bush when it suited their bigoted interests. It was only when the White House had President Obama in residence that this became a really bad idea.
