“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough was criticized for his comments Tuesday about the Biden administration’s border policies.
“The Biden administration right now is the one that’s luring these children to the border with the promise of being able to get in,” Scarborough fumed. “They’re letting families just dissolve into the country and not have a court date, not have a date to come back.”
“As long as you have a permissive immigration policy, you’re going to have a crisis at the border,” he added, going on to claim that Biden’s administration isn’t being clear enough that unaccompanied minors should not cross the border and, so, is creating a situation that is “dangerous for the children.”
Scarborough was responding directly to White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s insistence that the current influx of immigrants at the border, which includes masses of children, is not a “crisis” and should not be called one.
After her appearance on Tuesday’s show, the Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson wrote on Twitter, “There were a lot of inaccuracies in a Morning Joe segment that just ended. I only got a chance to respond to some of them and wanted to provide further clarity.”
“It is a not a ‘Biden administration policy’ that allows unaccompanied minors to request legal protection at the border. That is the American asylum system, codified into law by congress in the the Refugee Act of 1980,” she continued. “Case management programs that were eliminated by the Trump administration and are being reestablished now yielded immigration court appearance rates higher than 90% — not 25-30%. The general implication was that requesting asylum is unfair or illegal. It’s not. See above.”
Reuters White House editor Heather Timmons echoed Dickerson, tweeting, “US media continues misrepresent, or fail to understand US immigration laws, the size and scope of the problem etc.”
One viewer who responded to Dickerson castigated the program, noting that “politicizing a humanitarian crisis is beyond the pale.” Another described Scarborough’s argument as “baseless, right-wing, and very Trumpy.”
Veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien branded the segment full of “misinformation” while others expressed frustration that Scarborough spent time critiquing the president instead of discussing Monday night’s shooting in Boulder, Colo., which left at least 10 dead. “Morning Joe” did devote significant coverage to the shooting in its three-hour programming block Tuesday morning.