Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused “The View” co-host Ana Navarro of twisting her words as she praised President Donald Trump for securing the border during Monday’s show.
Navarro noted that the president said during an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday that he might have been “too tough” on immigration, and asked Sanders, “I’m wondering if you agree with him, and if he actually believes that? How do you reconcile elevating Stephen Miller, the architect of some of the most draconian immigration policies that we saw in Trump 1 when you were there, and now in Trump 2, including family separations and the Muslim travel ban? How do those two things go together? Make it make sense, because it makes no sense to me.”
Sanders, who served as Trump’s second press secretary during his first term, said, “I think the first thing is the president was exactly right to secure our border and to put an intense focus on violent, criminal illegals. I think that was the right place. I think it needed to happen–”
“I have to stop you there because the majority of the people that are being detained and deported do not have violent criminal convictions,” Navarro interjected.
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Sanders argued that wasn’t what she said.
“You’re not going to twist my words around. What I said was the president was right to focus on those people. I think we have to have a secure border, and I think he did that. At the same time, I think he is right to be reflective and say there were certain people we shouldn’t have cracked down on,” Sanders added.
During an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Trump told CBS’ Ross Douthat that his immigration policy may have been “too tough.”
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“I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump answered. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border… I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.”
However, Trump acknowledged that many illegal immigrants living in the country were “good” people, a point he suggested had contributed to criticism of his immigration policies.
“But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that — that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes. And there’s a large group of people [who] think that they should be allowed to stay,” Trump said.
The White House did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Sanders recounted the death of an Arkansas pediatric nurse who she said was killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk-driving crash.
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“There was a woman, Jennifer Ann Morton. She’s a pediatric nurse in my state. She should be alive today if it had not been for an illegal immigrant that killed her on her way to work because they were driving drunk,” she said. “That shouldn’t have happened. That person was deported during Trump 1, came back under the Biden administration, and now she is no longer living in my state taking care of some of the most vulnerable children in our state.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin pushed back, “What about the 97% of those that [Trump] deported that did nothing criminal?”
A Migration Policy Institute fact sheet from October said that 20% of the Trump administration’s deportations in the first 18 months of his second term involved individuals with a criminal conviction.
Sanders said that the president was right to reflect on some of his policies and called for comprehensive immigration reform.
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Fox News contributor Joe Concha told Fox News Digital in a statement about Navarro’s remarks, “The bottom line is that Navarro hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden during his reelection campaign. She approved of his handling of the border. And for her to blame Trump for trying to clean up the Biden administration’s mess is 31 flavors of unintentional comedy.”