Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused “The View” co-host Ana Navarro of twisting her words Monday during a heated exchange over President Donald Trump’s immigration record.
Navarro brought up Trump’s remarks in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, in which the president said he might have been “too tough” on immigration. She pressed Sanders: “I’m wondering if you agree with him, and if he actually believes that? How do you reconcile elevating Stephen Miller, the architect of some of the most draconian immigration policies that we saw in Trump 1 when you were there, and now in Trump 2, including family separations and the Muslim travel ban? How do those two things go together? Make it make sense, because it makes no sense to me.”
Sanders, who served as Trump’s press secretary during his first term, responded: “I think the first thing is the president was exactly right to secure our border and to put an intense focus on violent, criminal illegals. I think that was the right place. I think it needed to happen–”
Navarro cut in: “I have to stop you there because the majority of the people that are being detained and deported do not have violent criminal convictions.”
Sanders disputed the characterization of her statement. “You’re not going to twist my words around. What I said was the president was right to focus on those people. I think we have to have a secure border, and I think he did that. At the same time, I think he is right to be reflective and say there were certain people we shouldn’t have cracked down on,” she said.
In the “60 Minutes” interview that prompted the segment, Trump told CBS’ Ross Douthat that his immigration approach “both helped and hurt.” He said, “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border… I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” But he also acknowledged that many immigrants living illegally in the country were “good” people, adding: “I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that — that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes. And there’s a large group of people [who] think that they should be allowed to stay.”
Sanders used the exchange to raise the case of Jennifer Ann Morton, an Arkansas pediatric nurse she said was killed by an illegal immigrant driving drunk.
“There was a woman, Jennifer Ann Morton. She’s a pediatric nurse in my state. She should be alive today if it had not been for an illegal immigrant that killed her on her way to work because they were driving drunk. That shouldn’t have happened. That person was deported during Trump 1, came back under the Biden administration, and now she is no longer living in my state taking care of some of the most vulnerable children in our state,” Sanders said.
Co-host Sunny Hostin pushed back, asking, “What about the 97% of those that [Trump] deported that did nothing criminal?” A Migration Policy Institute fact sheet from October found that 20% of the Trump administration’s deportations in the first 18 months of his second term involved individuals with a criminal conviction.
Sanders said the president was right to reflect on some of his policies and called for comprehensive immigration reform.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha weighed in on Navarro’s comments in a statement to Fox News Digital: “The bottom line is that Navarro hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden during his reelection campaign. She approved of his handling of the border. And for her to blame Trump for trying to clean up the Biden administration’s mess is 31 flavors of unintentional comedy.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
