President Donald Trump’s favorite cable-news program has wasted no time going to bat for the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
Over Father’s Day weekend, the hosts of Fox & Friends—the Fox News flagship morning show—took turns defending Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, describing the family separations as an uncomfortable but necessary way to deter illegal immigration.
“Criminals are separated from their kids every day in the United States of America,” co-host Steve Doocy declared Monday morning.
“We do have sympathy for those parents—who wouldn’t? You don’t want a parent to be separated from their child,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said. “But you’re right: If they make the choice to do it, there will be consequences.”
On both Fox & Friends and its weekend counterpart, the hosts reserved more outrage for how the media and critics describe the policy than for the cruel separation policy itself.
During one Monday morning segment, co-host Brian Kilmeade argued that Democrats and conservative opponents of the child-separation policy—including former First Lady Laura Bush—have been overdramatic in comparing the detention centers to prison camps like the ones the U.S. government forced Japanese-Americans into during World War II.
“A lot of Democrats are using this as an opportunity to grandstand,” Kilmeade said after claiming liberals were “blowing the whole thing out of proportion to act like the president is anti-children.”
Other hosts got pedantic, deflecting from the policy itself by admonishing reporters for using too harsh a descriptor to diagnose what goes on at the detention camps.
Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, for example, slammed former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for calling the detention facilities “concentration camps.” The detention facilities, Hegseth argued, are actually a welcome change for the immigrant children.
“One man’s concentration camp, according to Michael Steele, is another man’s shelter,” Hegseth said Saturday morning. “These kids are going in, they’re being taken care of by our government, are being fed, clothed, provided for, helped to contact their parents, to be reunited.”
That same morning, co-host Abby Huntsman did suggest the separation policy was “not sustainable,” but, like her colleague, immediately pivoted to bashing the media for its coverage of the facilities. “They’re not in cages, they’re not being gassed,” she said of the immigrant children.
Press Sec. Sarah Sanders: "There have been a number of individuals that are permanently separated from their families due to the illegal aliens that have come across this border and have murdered and killed American citizens. Where is the outrage over that separation?" pic.twitter.com/NtuCYSNo6n
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) June 18, 2018