With the immigration crisis increasing pressure on law enforcement trying to contain the mass influx of migrants, President Trump’s immigration plan has found an unlikely supporter in some mainstream media outlets, even as Democrats in Congress continue to obstruct the plan.
“The media now has found Jesus…on immigration,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said Tuesday on the Todd Starnes Show. “We’ve been telling them now for two years this problem is getting exorbitantly worse.” Click here to listen to the full interview.
Gidley’s comments came after Starnes referenced two recent articles, one from The Hill, and another from the New York Times, that seemed to indicate some newfound warmth for the president’s immigration policy, including funding for the wall.
The Hill cited a Harvard poll that revealed that two out of every three Americans do not support releasing illegal immigrants into the country while those immigrants await an asylum trial.
The New York Times, similarly, found itself telling Congressional Democrats that they should give President Trump money to fund the border wall.
Gidley said it was “encouraging” that the issue of the border was now getting some acknowledgement, but added that it’s a little late.
“Where was all of that when the president was addressing the American people directly from the Oval Office after which Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer came out and basically said that this was a manufactured crisis on three separate occasions,” he said. “The problem has been a 40-50 year problem in the making and they’re still not lifting a finger to fix it.”
Starnes asked Gidley about the number of Democratic representatives in Congress who ran on a platform of cooperation on immigration with the Trump White House, and if there had been any support coming from them.
Gidley noted that instead of cooperation, the Democrats had instead resorted to “100-plus days of nonsense, of investigation, not legislation” and that those “moderate” representatives had refused to “have a conversation about how we fix this.”
“Democrats are nowhere to be found but we do believe this is starting to turn in our favor,” Gidley said.
What the president’s trying to do is do a long term fix on the situation so we’re not in the same problem five years down the road 10 years down the road,” he added. “And so he’s looking at everything legislatively that can be done, and he’s also looking at everything he can do from the executive branch.”