It’s no secret to anyone who has paid attention to the Trump administration for any amount of time that the belligerent businessman’s team is not fond of immigrants. At one point, the president was even reported to have referred to certain areas of the world as “shithole countries,” an alleged remark that came after months of the president railing against immigrant groups ranging from foreign born Muslims to Mexicans.
One of those who share the president’s viewpoints when it comes to immigrants is Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren, who went on a wild anti-immigrant tirade early Sunday morning on Fox & Friends, invoking the “spirit of Easter” in the process.
What sparked her outrage was the recent pardon of five undocumented immigrants to the United States by California Governor Jerry Brown.
All of the men had served out their sentences and since begun to live law-abiding lives, but the convictions hanging over them made them vulnerable to deportation. The pardons, which were handed down along with pardons for others as well, thus help keep the men in the United States.
The president was furious with this move on Brown’s part.
He tweeted a message to that effect reading:
‘Governor Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown pardoned 5 criminal illegal aliens whose crimes include (1) Kidnapping and Robbery (2) Badly beating wife and threatening a crime with intent to terrorize (3) Dealing drugs. Is this really what the great people of California want?’
To be clear here, it’s not as though Governor Jerry Brown is the first executive of an American jurisdiction to issue pardons. Trump himself recently pardoned Kristian Saucier, who served a year in jail for taking photos inside classified areas of a nuclear submarine. Famously, he also pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio after the longtime Trump ally was convicted of criminal contempt for having refused to obey a court order against his office checking immigration statuses.
What’s going on then here is clear. Considering the president’s own past behavior, it’s not as though he has some obvious problem with American executives using their authority to pardon individuals convicted of crimes. He just has a problem with that authority being used to pardon undocumented immigrants, choosing to paint them as some kind of existential threat to American civilization.
Tomi Lahren shares the president’s problem with undocumented immigrants.
She commented:
‘We need to make sure that laws are respected. We need to make sure Americans come first in California and the rest of the country. So this is really just a message to all the conservatives in California and all the independent thinkers that believe in law and order. Get out and vote and make sure we don’t have this again… You don’t have to be a conservative or a Republican to understand that this is problematic. This is putting our communities in danger. That is not a partisan issue, and it shouldn’t be. So Californians, wake up.’
Even though Lahren claims that she’s just being reasonable, she and the other Fox contributors on the program singled out the five undocumented immigrants from among the 56 total people that Governor Brown pardoned recently. There’s no apparent explanation for the right singling these five people out other than bias against immigrants.
The segment then turned to covering a march of Central Americans to the United States border. Some of the march participants will be seeking asylum in the United States; most of them apparently come from areas with sky high crime rates.
That didn’t stop Lahren from treating them like animals, saying:
‘This is what we have coming to our borders and that’s why it’s more important than ever that we build a wall… And let me just say, in the spirit of Easter, if I didn’t live in the United States of America, I’d want to be here too. But this is not the way. Laws still matter. We are a nation of immigrants but we are a nation of lawful immigrants. That needs to be the message going forward.’
Check out the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRHchVhUVSA
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
