As the dominant liberal media have spent much of the past week fixated on the Trump administration stepping up prosecutions of those who illegally cross the border, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle dismissed reports of a sharp increase in illegals exploiting unrelated children to try to fraudulently enter the country.
On the Velshi and Ruhle show, the MSNBC host brought up a press conference in which DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the increased prosecutions of illegal border crossers that have resulted in more illegals being separated from their children, as required by law. Ruhle recounted:
She's justifying family separation by saying there is a huge jump in smugglers and gang members using kids unrelated to them to try to get inside the U.S. But, Ms. Nielsen, I hope you're watching. For fact's sake, You need to know some context.
The MSNBC host then played a clip of Nielsen reporting that there had been a tripling in the number of illegals crossing the border and "fraudulently claiming to be a family unit" over last year.
Ruhle responded: "Come on, now. The Washington Post points out this is actually a teeny tiny fraction of the families apprehended during that time period."
The MSNBC host then recalled that, even after the increase, only about 191 out of 31,000 families (or 0.6 percent) apprehended had fraudulently presented unrelated children as their own, but, instead of being taken aback that 31,000 families had crossed the border illegally in just five months, or showing concern for the children being smuggled, she downplayed the number of fraudulent cases as only a tiny percentage.
Ruhle: "It's like saying all homeless people must be drunks or broken out of an insane asylum. It's absurd."
She did not inform viewers of reports that -- as one might predict -- nearly all cases of immigrants trying to use fraud to enter the country tends to come from those who were trying to cross the border illegally rather than enter legally at a port of entry. Therefore, deterring illegal border crossings would be the best place to cut down on such fraud as it should be a giant red flag when people try to sneak into the country that they may have something serious to hide.
It is also ironic that the MSNBC host was fretting that Nielsen was misleadingly citing numbers only vaguely to suggest the number of fraud cases is higher than it actually is when, just a few weeks ago, her own news network hyped an estimate that there had been a doubling in white nationalists committing homicides in an attempt to link the spike to Republicans or conservatives.
In fact, it turned out that the total number of homicides that made the list was only 18 out of a total of about 14,000 killings total throughout the country for the entire year of 2017. And most of the 18 cases were whites killing other whites rather than interracial attacks.
