White House press secretary Sarah Sanders made an “unfortunate misstatement” about border security, her colleague Kellyanne Conway said Monday.
Sanders was fact-checked by “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace on Sunday about her claim that about 4,000 known or suspected terrorists have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. Government figures show in fiscal 2017 most of them tried to gain entry by air, as Wallace noted.
The spectacle received a wide swath of media coverage and on Monday the Homeland Security Department put out an explainer.
During an appearance on Fox News on Monday, Conway, who has her own track record of gaffes, said Sanders’ numbers “got unfortunately conflated” with information about the 3,000 “special interest aliens” that were encountered by border security officials last year. She urged people, and singled out the media, to not turn a “blind eye” now to the DHS press release that explains these individuals have “suspicious travel patterns who may pose a national security risk — not to mention the many criminals, smugglers, traffickers, and other threat actors who try to exploit our borders.”
“That was an unfortunate misstatement,” Conway told host Laura Ingraham of Sanders’ blunder. “Everybody makes mistakes, all of us. The fact is — it’s corrected here,” she added, referring to the DHS release.
[Also read: Trump to deliver prime-time address on ‘national security crisis’ at the border]
A senior administration official told CNN that government data shows only 12 known or suspected terrorists were caught at the southern border between October 2017 and October 2018.
