One of Fox News’ most visible white supremacists on Monday defended the Trump administration’s practice of forcibly removing children from their families and placing them in metal cages by likening the practice to summer camp.
Host Laura Ingraham tried to portray what amounts to government-sanctioned kidnapping as an inevitable byproduct of undocumented immigration, riffing on the Trump administration’s lie that the abductions are stipulated in federal law.
“Since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed at what are, essentially, summer camps,” she said during her primetime show on Fox News, the same network that once argued in favor of using military-grade pepper spray on children because it’s just a “food product, essentially.”
Laura Ingraham describes the detention facilities where children are sent after being forcibly separated from their parents as "essentially summer camps." pic.twitter.com/K6ao3lbS6Q
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 19, 2018
Though she didn’t disclose what summer camps she attended as a child, a 30-minute Google search yielded no results for summer camps that forcibly separate children from their homes, sometimes without informing their parents, and place them inside cages on cement floors.
Ingraham joins a growing orchestra of far-right figures who have applauded and defended Donald Trump’s efforts to terrorize months-old children of immigrants. On Monday afternoon, investigative reporting outfit ProPublica released an audio recording taken from inside one of the makeshift camps set up by the Department of Homeland Security in which several young children can be heard sobbing and asking for their mothers and fathers. Within hours, prominent white supremacists like Ann Coulter and Donald Trump Jr. were suggesting 8-month-olds were paid crisis actors, the same charge they have leveled at school shooting victims and anyone else they deem too sympathetic.
Ingraham’s fellow white supremacist colleague Tucker Carlson was equally incredulous on Monday, suggesting that any concern shown for the well-being of small children was disingenuous because gay people can get married.
You think any of these people care about family separation? If they did, they’d be upset about the collapse of the American family, which is measurable and real. They’re not. They welcome that collapse, because strong families are an impediment to their political power.
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 19, 2018
A supposed staunch champion of the nuclear family, Carlson’s rush to defend the anti-family edicts of a twice-divorced serial adulterer and alleged sexual predator only makes sense when you consider that the targets of that policy are, by and large, minority families. As Carlson himself made abundantly clear during his Monday evening broadcast, American families — ideally the white ones — are the only families we should really care about.