Janet Napolitano, President Obama’s former Homeland Security secretary, said Thursday that “living, breathing” borders are good for the U.S. economy, and blasted Donald Trump’s promise to build an “impenetrable, physical wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We have to recognize our borders are living breathing things, a lot of trade goes through the ports of entry at those borders. That’s a good thing. It’s a job creator for border communities. And we don’t view it just as a physical wall. That’s not the way a border works,” she said during a Thursday interview on MSNBC.
In response to Trump’s claims that he would implement a policy of “extreme vetting” for immigrants, Napolitano said it is “a mystery in terms of what he’s talking about” before suggesting the Republican presidential candidate would pursue ideological and racial profiling.
“I think what he’s talking about is ideological screening,” she said. “You know, are you going to be American if you immigrate to the United States? And that’s, that’s just something that we don’t do and it’s just unworkable.”
Napolitano also suggested his policy proposals were un-American.
“I think he’s talking about any level of crime — traffic offenses, loitering and the like that you quickly run into areas of racial profiling for example,” she said. “The notion of a force kind of walking around looking for people with traffic offenses and loitering and the like, I’m not sure that’s consistent with American values.”
