The White House is pushing back after MSNBC host Joe Scarborough compared the Trump administration’s border policies to Nazi tactics.
“It is appalling that Joe Scarborough would compare sworn federal law enforcement officers — who put their lives on the line every day to keep American people safe — to Nazis,” read a statement from White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley.
On Thursday, Morning Joe host Scarborough repeated a claim that illegal-immigrant parents are being told their children will be taken to go bathe, only for the government to separate their families indefinitely.
“Public defenders, in the federal courts down there in McAllen, Texas reporting that children are being told and their parents are being told that they’re being taken off to the showers. And that they’ll return. And they never return,” Scarborough said. “I know children are being marched away to showers, marched away to showers. Being told they are — just like the Nazis said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back.”
“This is Donald Trump’s America. And yes, it sounds like something we would be condemning, coming out of North Korea,” Scarborough said to co-host Mika Brzezinski.
The White House’s statement said Scarborough’s “facts are categorically false.”
“When American citizens break the law, they are separated from their children and prosecuted,” the statement said. “It’s unclear why Scarborough believes that illegal aliens are entitled to more rights than those afforded to American citizens.”
“This is the type of inflammatory and unacceptable rhetoric that puts a target on the backs of our great law enforcement,” the deputy press secretary said.
“While Scarborough is quick to launch into his straight-to-camera outrage over the temporary separation of illegal alien families, he has never shown similar outrage for the permanent separation of American families forever torn apart from their children, who were killed by criminal aliens as a result of Democrats’ open borders policies. If Joe Scarborough actually cared about keeping illegal alien families together, he would use his platform to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to close loopholes in federal immigration law.”
The shower claim originated with Boston Globe reporter Liz Goodwin.
A public defender in McAllen says some migrants are told their kids are going to be taken away briefly to bathe, and then it dawns on them hours later they aren’t coming back
— Liz Goodwin (@lizcgoodwin) June 10, 2018
“Aleman-Bendiks, the public defender, said several of her clients have told her their children were taken from them by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back,” Goodwin wrote.