Sen. Bernie Sanders would not close America’s borders in response to the coronavirus outbreak if he were president.
“No,” Sanders replied when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked him if he would close the borders if he “had to” during a Monday night town hall on the network.
“I mean, what you don’t want to do right now — we have a president who has propagated a xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment from before he was elected,” the 2020 Democrat said. “What we need to do is have the scientists take a hard look at what we need to do.”
“Isn’t it interesting that a president who has been demagoguing and demonizing immigrants, the first thing that he can think about is closing down the border?” he continued. “We need scientists to tell us the appropriate approach.”
Trump indicated last month that closing the border to combat the spread of the coronavirus was on the table.
“We are looking also at [the] southern border,” he said when asked about the idea. “We have received a lot of power on the southern border over the last couple years from the courts, but we are looking at that very strongly.”
However, the president backed off of that a few days later, telling the public that the administration is no longer considering the action.
The Fox News town hall was held in Michigan, where Sanders had been hoping to repeat his 2016 primary victory over Hillary Clinton. However, he fell short in that quest on Tuesday night, losing the state’s primary to former Vice President Joe Biden.
