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CBS’s King After Colleague’s Noem Interview: Deportations Are ‘Scaring and Off-Putting’
After having taped on Monday and a small excerpt shown Tuesday about two illegal immigrants being the alleged suspects in her purse having been stolen, Wednesday’s CBS Mornings finally unspooled co-host Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and, while the interview itself wasn’t as hostile as, say, ABC’s Terry Moran with President Trump, it had plenty of bias with analysis afterward.
Most notably, there was this from co-host Gayle King:
To make sure things ended on a positive note, Dokoupil quickly interjected that he wanted to “thank the Secretary for bringing us down there” for “an interesting conversation.” King dropped her pathetic high horse bit and admitted Noem “was very candid with you” and “answered everything you asked her.”
Going back to the beginning, Dokoupil started with a largely positive picture for Trump, a rare move in the liberal media:
President Trump won back the White House promising tighter border security and a crackdown on illegal immigration, and those things have happened. Border Patrol apprehended nearly 138,000 people at the southern border illegally in March of last year, and that number fell to 7,000 just a year later, it’s a decrease of about 95 percent in 12 months. Deportation numbers, though, have been slower to change.
The voice-overs started off positive as well with the ATV vehicles convoy to the border that, along with being “shadowed by Mexican forces across the Rio Grande,” they saw “little more than sunshine and dust in a region where federal data shows more than 55,000 people cross the border illegally in just one month under the Biden administration.”
He first asked her about her forward-facing strategy of going on ride-alongs with immigration officials and going down to the El Salvadoran prison CECOT and if those are all meant to convey a message of “self-deport now or this could be you.”
Next, he posed to her the case of the Honduran illegal immigrant who chose to take her American child with her.
Noem said she rejects the notion the administration deported an American citizen. In a follow-up Dokoupil wondered if this is “hardness” of America on display (click “expand”):
NOEM: I fundamentally disagree with that. I’m sure that these judges will continue to challenge every single thing that this administration does. We have several activist judges across the country that have made claims such as this, but that mother made a choice for her child and wanted to keep her child with her, so —
DOKOUPIL: So, if a relative here in the U.S. wants that child back, and the mother agrees, the child will come back.
NOEM: — yes, absolutely, and that’s the process. You know, this mother gave us documentation and fully said she wanted her child with her, and we honored that.
DOKOUPIL: Is harshness part of the message when it comes to the removal of mothers who have American children?
NOEM: No, I think that with that, with families, we recognize that families can stay together, and so these mothers get the option to take their children with them, which I think is absolutely where President Trump’s heart is.
DOKOUPIL: Should those non-American mothers have that option, or should the American children have a right to stay here?
NOEM: I think the mothers should have the option to have their children with them, and then if those mothers do leave and choose to register and self-deport, them and their children can come back, or if they want to have their child cared for by somebody else in the United States, that’s an option that they can pursue, too.
Following some training footage of Border Patrol special operations forces, Dokoupil insisted to Noem no one is opposed to deporting bad hombres:
Nobody wants would-be terrorists or gang members in the country or violent criminals of any kind. Nobody — nobody forgets or discounts the pain of families who have lost loved ones to those people. How do they know that those people on the flights in the chains are actually terrorists and gang members?
Noem calmly hit back that “[w]e have spent hours and hours building cases against them” with “the victims that speak up that they have perpetuated crimes against.”
Dokoupil continued to belabor the point with the liberal media’s beloved buzzword of “due process.”
The rest the show aired consisted of — wait for it — Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Dokoupil wondered “what have you done...to help facilitate his return to the U.S.” and, if not, why not.
Back live, Dokoupil claimed unaired portions made him “wonder, actually, about whether there was any softer side to the Secretary and the administration” (click “expand”):
DOKOUPIL: So you can hear what’s tough to discern, because on the one hand, she says it’s President Trump’s decision what to do with Garcia, but on the other hand, she’s saying that they’re listening to the courts, but those statements can’t both be true —
NATE BURLESON: Because there’s some confliction there.
DOKOUPIL: They’re in conflict. Yes, the courts are asking the Trump administration to do some things that they’ve yet to do or yet to talk about doing. So, you know, all of this tough talk made me wonder, actually, about whether there was any softer side to the Secretary and to the administration. I did ask about the role of heart in all of this, and it was interesting what she said.
KING: And she said what?
DOKOUPIL: She said, “There’s heart in all of our immigration conversation. It’s about families and it’s about people,” I followed up by wondering, are we still a welcoming country for legal immigration? And her message was yes, absolutely. The idea that the administration has is they have to get through this tough period now, clean up what they see as a big mess from years gone by, and then the door will open again.
CBS Mornings Plus featured more of the interview. After Dokoupil made sure to reiterate the administration’s 95 percent drop in crossings from the same time last year under Joe Biden, he asked her about comments from the acting director of ICE that he said showed the comparison being made between deportations and delivering Amazon packages.
Noem disputed this, saying she “wouldn’t do that,” but DHS and its agencies are nonetheless “a professional organization that upholds the law and law enforcement officers and — but we do need to make sure that we don’t want people to be here and be in detention centers for long periods of time.”
Back live, Dokoupil told co-host Adriana Diaz that what the administration wants is “make things feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, and insecure for people here illegally or who crossed illegally and here without documentation, because their hope is that they will self-deport rather than wait to get rounded up in some sort of raid.”
Asked what else surprised him among topics that didn’t make the air, Dokoupil opined he was “surpris[ed]” by “the degree to which they realize they don’t have the resources for deportations to find, detain, and then go through the process of pushing people out.”
To see the relevant CBS transcript from April 30, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).
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