Fact Check: Pelosi Manages to Get Nearly Everything Wrong During 2 Minutes of Interview
It’s not easy to be this wrong, this fast. But Nancy Pelosi managed to pull it off.
In an interview Sunday morning with ABC’s reliably liberal George Stephanopoulos, the Democratic House speaker managed to cram in a series of statements about the situation on the southern border that was so wrong it was almost like she was trying to mislead the American public.
But when it comes to defending President Joe Biden’s indefensible border policies, there isn’t much else she could do.
Pelosi was fielding a question from Stephanopoulos when she launched into her spiel.
Stephanopoulos had asked about a statement Friday by Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso who, as Townhall reported, had blamed the Trump administration — naturally — for the current crisis.
Pelosi — naturally — agreed.
And managed to mangle just about every fact she presented in the process.
Check it out here:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the surge of migrant children crossing the Southern border “a humanitarian challenge,” adding that the Biden administration has inherited a “broken system at the border.” https://t.co/UNXhabLMfs pic.twitter.com/on69lT7LLX
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) March 14, 2021
“The — actually, the facts of these, there are more children, about 600, 700 more children, unaccompanied children coming over the border. This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi said.
“What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest…
“So this, again, is a transition for what was wrong before to what is right. Of course, we have to also look to Central America, Mexico and the rest. The corruption, the violence, all of that’s so bad.”
Being a Democrat, Pelosi also had to throw in “climate change” as a driver of illegal immigration, and, of course, hold up the supposed “responsibilities” of the United States, which apparently include taking in every individual human who can make it across the borders — with or without permission.
It might have played well to the kind of audience that thinks a former Clinton White House press secretary like Stephanopoulos can pass as a “journalist” (conservatives know better), but Pelosi had the problem of being wrong on nearly every point.
First of all, it wasn’t clear where the figure of “600, 700 more children” Pelosi referred to was coming from, but suffice it to say it’s a number that drastically undercounts the magnitude of the situation.
As CBS reported March 6, far from the relative handful of 600 or 700, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been on the order of 337 per day, every day through February and into March.
In the first full month of the Biden administration, the Office of Refugee Resettlement was saddled with more than 7,000 children, according to CBS. In February of 2019, the month then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over surge of illegal immigration, the agency had 5,900 children.
By any logical standard, the scenario is a disaster. But the Biden White House still refuses to call what is taking place now a “crisis.”
As to Pelosi’s claim that Biden “inherited a broken system,” even Americans who only casually follow the news would know that pretty much the opposite is true. Biden “inherited” a system where Trump had imposed a semblance of order.
What Biden did immediately was to take a wrecking ball to that order — halting border wall construction so abruptly that it literally smoothed the way for more illegal immigration, ending the “remain in Mexico” program that even Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had accepted, and essentially inviting a surge of illegal immigration as predictable as a Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful protest” turning into a full-fledged riot at nightfall.
“So this, again, is a transition from what was wrong before to what is right,” Pelosi told Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
Again, the truth is exactly the opposite. Biden has put a halt to the slow but steady strides toward sanity that Trump’s immigration policies had taken on immigration policy and thrown the country into reverse — once again taxing border control and refugee agencies well beyond their limits while swamping border towns with illegal aliens.
There’s no world where any of that can be called “right,” by any stretch of the imagination.
Pelosi concluded her statement with the worst misstatement of fact of all.
In a reference to the resettlement program as the “crown jewel of American humanitarianism” she said the country must be mindful of its place in the world.
“So we have certain responsibilities that we must honor,” Pelosi said. “We have to have a system that accommodates that, and that is what the Biden administration is in the process of doing.”
Actually, the first and most important “responsibility” the American government must honor is its responsibility to the American people to protect the welfare of the population.
What the Biden administration is doing — in typically feckless Democratic fashion — is sacrificing the safety and stability of the country to the liberal ideal of open borders.
During a news conference in 1984, then-President Ronald Reagan, one of the greatest chief executives in American history, described the country’s immigration problem succinctly while answering a question about an immigration reform bill that eventually became law:
“But the simple truth is that we’ve lost control of our own borders,” he said, according to The New York Times, “and no nation can do that and survive.”
Whatever the merits or drawbacks of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 — and 35 years later, it obviously didn’t solve the problem — there was no denying the truth of Reagan’s words then, and there’s no denying it now.
A nation that cannot control its borders cannot survive.
It’s a truth even a liberal like Pelosi is too intelligent not to recognize.
But, as Sunday’s performance showed, it’s one she’ll never tell.
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