On Friday's Cuomo Prime Time, CNN host Chris Cuomo again devoted most of his show to pushing hard from the left on the issue of the Trump administration increasing prosecutions of illegal border crossings.
Cuomo and liberal CNN commentator Catherine Rampell again misleadingly claimed legal asylum seekers are also separated from their children even though they usually are not unless there are exceptional circumstances. The CNN host -- who, unlike his colleague Jake Tapper, has so far ignored congressional Democrats who have connections to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan -- gave a Democratic member of Congress a forum to accuse the White House of having ties to "white supremacists."
During a debate between Rampell and conservative economist Stephen Moore, Rampbell misleadingly claimed that there is not a crisis of illegal border crossings as she ignored recent statistics and instead cited outdated 2017 numbers on illegal border crossing in that year being down: "If you look at the numbers from last year about border apprehensions on the Southwest border, they were at their lowest level since 1971."
She soon repeated the myth that legal asylum seekers are treated the same as those who cross the border illegally and then try to seek asylum after they are caugtht:
A lot of these people aren't even actually crossing the border illegally -- they are trying to present themselves at a port of entry, which is what the U.S. government tells them to do. So they are, again, to reiterate, they are not crossing the border illegally -- they are applying for asylum.
They are still being separated from their children, and the reason why this has been happening -- the reason why it has been a Trump administration policy is to serve as a deterrent. It's not about, you know, punishing people for breaking the law -- which, again, this could be a misdemeanor even if they had broken the law, which many of them are not.
Cuomo soon pushed hyperbole as he claimed Trump is "treating these kids like crap." He then contradicted himself by first suggesting the Obama administration did not similarly treat children, but then pivoted to suggesting that they were treated like "crap" sometimes during the Obama administration as well. Lecturing Moore, Cuomo bellowed:
Either you're treating these kids like crap or you're not. If you are -- and you are -- then you can't say, "So did Obama," because we just had the ACLU guy, and, as you know, they'll go after anybody. They do it all the time. They were really upset in 2014 about those unaccompanied minors and how they were treated like crap.
They went after Obama, but they didn't see it as the point of policy perfected. And that's what they see here with you guys -- that you wanted this to happen, you knew it would happen, and you did it to send a message. Now, you have to own it.
In a later segment, during a debate between liberal commentator Angela Rye and conservative commentator John Fredericks, Cuomo again echoed the myth of legal asylum seekers being treated the same as criminals when they try to legally pass through ports of entry: "And the ones who are, you're locking up anyway."
In another segment, Cuomo brought in Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal to accuse White House advisor Stephen Miller of being linked to "white supremacists." Cuomo plugged the segment: "She says the Trump administration's immigration policies are being decided by someone with ties to white supremacists."
