A Border Patrol agent Thursday reacted angrily to media coverage of President Donald Trump’s since-rescinded policy of separating illegal immigrant parents from their children near the border.
Art Del Cueto, president of the U.S. Border Patrol Council chapter in Tucson, Arizona, expressed disgust during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” with some of the over-the-top comparisons of border agents to Nazi Germans during World War II. (He is pictured above, second from right.)
“It is sickening that certain members of the media have chosen to attack our president,” he said. “It is sickening that certain members of the media have chosen to attack Border Patrol agents and describe us as Nazis. That is just — it’s disgusting that you would even think that.”
The Trump administration sparked a firestorm in April with a so-called zero-tolerance policy, which called for criminal charges against first-time illegal border crossers, even if it meant separating parents from their children. Trump sought to contain the damage Wednesday with an executive order calling for families to be held together in temporary shelters when adults face criminal charges.
Del Cueto said Border Patrol agents are not mistreating children. He said he and other officers, in fact, often use their own money to buy food, toys and clothes to help foreign children that they encounter without adults. He recalled a recent incident in which a man tossed a kid over a border fence with a handwritten note asking help finding the child’s mother.
“To compare us to Nazis, that is just a whole new low,” he said. “That is just the most disgusting thing. These people are idiots for that comparison, or they need to go back to school and actually learn history.”
Fox News host Laura Ingraham played a clip of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) talking in 2014 about her visit to one of the temporary shelters used to hold illegal immigrant children on a short-term basis.
Pelosi at the time praised the Border Patrol, which she said was doing the best it could under the circumstances. She offered none of the criticism about the conditions of the facility that have been heard so frequently over the past week.
What explains the stark difference from four years ago, considering that the facilities now described as “internment camps” are the same as they were in 2014?
“Well, now it’s 2018, and I think you look at a president who started his whole campaign and his presidency talking about a building a wall, citing a whole group of people as rapists … There’s lots of misperceptions,” said Suzan Johnson Cook, a former adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (pictured above, on the left).
Related: House Defeats Hard-Line Immigration Reform Bill
Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union (ACU), accused the Left of hypocrisy.
“All President Trump was doing was following the law,” said Schlapp (pictured above, second from left). “This is very important for people to understand. He was following the law that President Obama had to follow, that the courts had established with the executive branch since the 1990s.”
Del Cueto said he finds it ironic that Border Patrol agents face demonization while parents who endanger their children win sympathy in the mainstream media.
“They’re such great parents that they’re giving their child to criminal organizations so they can put them in a trunk of a vehicle, so they can travel through the desert or travel through very dangerous areas,” he said.
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
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