First daughter Ivanka Trump isn’t fooling anyone despite how she appeared when asked about immigration in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS. “Well, immigration is not in part of my portfolio,” Ivanka Trump told CBS host Margaret Brennan.
Still, anyone even remotely following the younger but arguably wiser Trump can probably tell that the stories of thousands of children separated from their families under President Donald Trump’s administration aren’t lost on Ivanka Trump. Even while the president was asserting a "zero tolerance" policy to prosecute illegal immigrants, well at least those of color not directly serving him, Ivanka Trump called family separation “a low point for me," according to Axios. "I feel very strongly about that,” she said at the organization’s event last year. “I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children."
She may have felt liberated to give the opinion because at the time her father had just signed an executive order promising to stop separating families of undocumented immigrants, according to a White House press release. But more than one year later with hundreds of children of immigrants reportedly still separated from their families, she’s seemingly less liberated to speak on the topic. Brennan cited “around 900 children who remain separated from their families” when she asked the senior advisor to the president: “Is that something you continue to remain engaged on when it comes to immigration?”
The fashion designer’s response, though flowing clearly and articulately—with regards to content—sounded like the nervous babbling of a politician stumped by a question. The more she talked, the worse it got. “Obviously, I think everyone should be engaged, and the full force of the U.S. government is committed to this effort to border security, to protecting the most vulnerable,” she said. “That includes those being trafficked across our border, which this president has committed to countering and combatting human trafficking in an incredibly comprehensive, aggressive way. So the full United States government has been focused on this issue starting with the president.”
Look, I get it. If I were tasked with defending some reprehensible decision my father made, my argument might similarly lack cogency. “Ivanka Trump, thank you very much,” Brennan said in response. Really, what else could she say?
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