White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders engaged in heated exchanges with multiple reporters on Thursday over the administration’s controversial policy of separating migrant families at the border.
“Don’t you have any empathy?” Brian Karem, the White House reporter for Playboy, asked at the press briefing Thursday afternoon. “You’re a parent of young children."
Sanders blamed the practice on Democrats, saying the party refuses to “come to the table” and find a larger immigration solution.
“The separation of illegal alien families is a product of the same legal loopholes that Democrats refuse to close," Sanders said. "And these laws are the same that have been on the books for over a decade and the president is simply enforcing them."
CNN reporter Jim Acosta also pressed Sanders on the family separation policy, which has increasingly garnered national attention with critics calling it cruel to immigrants, many of whom are seeking asylum.
“It’s a policy to take children away from their parents," Acosta said. "Can you imagine the horror these children must be going to, when they come across the border, they’re with their parents and suddenly they’re pulled away from their parents? Why is government doing this?”
“Because it’s the law,” Sanders said. “It doesn’t have to be the law. The president has called on Democrats in Congress to fix those loopholes. The Democrats have failed to come to the table, failed to help this president close these loopholes and fix this problem. We don’t want this to be a problem. The president has tried to address it on a number of occasions, we’ve laid out a proposal and Democrats simply refuse to do their job.”
As Acosta pressured Sanders to explain the administration’s rationale for enforcing the policy, Sanders shot back: "I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences."
The exchange began when Acosta brought up a comment by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who said there is a biblical justification for the zero-tolerance border policy.
“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” Sanders said.
The original story can be found here.
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