CNN contributor Sally Kohn jumped to President Obama’s defense on “At This Hour” Wednesday, suggesting that the American people shouldn’t hold the president to “ridiculously higher standards” and expect him to visit the southern border and fix the current immigrant crisis there.
She specifically addressed photos taken Tuesday night that show Obama playing pool and drinking beer in Colorado with Gov. John Hickenlooper amid ongoing border control problems.
“On the one hand, we could have a conversation about sort of every little optical moment and choice that this White House has made, not all of which that I would necessarily agree with,” Kohn explained, “but I do think it’s fascinating that they do seem to be held to this sort of ridiculously higher standard of, ‘Oh, well, he’s only supposed to do one thing at one time.'”
What? The president can’t hold a Bud Light in one hand and secure the border with the other?
Kohn significantly downplayed the young migrants flooding the border, despite the fact that U.S. authorities anticipate that a whopping 60,000 to 80,000 unaccompanied youths will cross our border this year.
“The reason he’s not visiting the border is very obvious to me: This is not a border crisis,” Kohn asserted. “These kids are coming to the border, they’re getting stopped, the border’s working. Republicans are trying to turn this into a narrative of, ‘The border isn’t working. We have a crisis.’ The immigration policies aren’t working.”
She also suggested that this “uptick in kids” migrating to the U.S. is nothing knew and thus nothing to worry about in and of itself.
CNN host Michaela Pereira fought back at Kohn, asserting that there is an argument to be made for a dysfunctional border considering these kids are stuck in “purgatory” as they attempt to enter the U.S.
Kohn rebutted, “What Republicans are saying is it’s a sign the president has failed to secure the border. Well, they’re not slipping through over the border. It’s just not happening.”
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat also challenged Kohn’s assertion, explaining that the problems facing border control are exactly those indicative of what anyone would call a border crisis.
“There’s a lot of evidence that these agents who are essentially stopping these migrants and taking responsibility for them are being forced to neglect other duties like … drug interdiction [which] has dropped off during this crisis,” Douthat explained. “So, there are specific problems that are happening on the border and then talking about a border crisis, I think, reasonably encompasses a lot of the other difficulties we’re having right now.”
While plenty of commentators and lawmakers — Democrats included — are criticizing Obama’s refusal to visit the border on his Texas trip, Kohn joins the White House in its avid defense of the president. Meanwhile, even some folks at MSNBC are slamming Obama for snubbing the border for beer.
This isn’t the first time Kohn has created a stir with her comments on illegal immigrants. Just last week, she wrote a column for CNN in which she compared the words “f—-t” and “n—-r” to “illegal” and urged Americans to stop describing undocumented migrants as such.
