Sinclair Broadcast Group kept up its quest to be Fox News, Only More So this week with an interview giving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acting director Ken Cuccinelli the chance to explain how wonderful and humane Trump administration immigration policy is. The interview, in one of Sinclair’s loathed “must-run” segments featuring former Trump staffer and Sinclair messaging thug Boris Epshteyn, is framed by Epshteyn as a response to the recent ICE raids in Mississippi, though Cuccinelli says not a word about them in what aired.
“In the wake of recent ICE raids, Democrats and many on the left have gone as far as to say that our current administration is somehow anti-immigrant or anti-immigration,” Epshteyn says by way of introduction. “I recently sat down with acting Director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Office, Ken Cuccinelli. I asked him about this perception.”
Yes, this “perception” that the Trump administration is “somehow” anti-immigrant. How could anyone have possibly “gone so far as to say” any of that?
Cuccinelli’s response was that the Trump administration is naturalizing a lot of new citizens, “So it's awfully hard for people, on the numbers, to point to this administration and say we're somehow stifling legal immigration. We're not.” Though, of course, people being naturalized in 2018 became permanent residents no later than 2015, and most earlier. In other words, the Trump administration did not admit them, it only allowed them to become citizens after they had spent years qualifying to do so.
Cuccinelli then emphasized Trump’s favor toward “self-sufficient immigrants” and “people who can help companies that are struggling to find American workers to fill slots.” Although all those people in the Mississippi ICE raids were apparently filling slots in a company. It’s not clear, Media Matters says, whether the interview was done before or after Cuccinelli’s racist comments about the Statue of Liberty, but either way he’s referring to the same basic idea, that the U.S. should only admit people who are already privileged.
“Here's the bottom line,” Epshteyn concluded. “What ICE is doing is not a targeted attack on people in our country. It is our government enforcing our laws. Period.” Yeah, just as Sean Spicer said, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”