MS Now host Joe Scarborough said he was “struck” by Fox News host Sean Hannity calling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find “a more responsible, reasonable way” to deport illegal immigrants.
Tuesday’s episode of MS Now’s Morning Joe featured a segment from Hannity’s radio show the Sean Hannity Show from Monday.
“Is ICE perfect? They’re not. Can they do a better job? They can,” Hannity said. “Do I think that going into Home Depots and arresting people there is a good idea? I don’t.
Instead, Hannity recommended a program to encourage illegal immigrants “to come forward.”
“I think they should then be given transportation home. They can get a check for, what, $2,000, and they can apply to come back in the country legally,” Hannity said. “We can vet them, we can do a health check on them and make sure they won’t be a financial burden on the American people. I think that’d be a more responsible, reasonable way to deal with that problem.”
Scarborough alleged that he, as a former GOP congressman, has held this same position “since 1994.”
“I am struck by Sean Hannity’s words,” Scarborough said Tuesday. “I’m struck that the administration didn’t start here. And I’m struck because, again, most Americans believe that if you are here illegally, that you should be deported. As Sean Hannity said, people have been talking about this for years: Give people money to get back home, then have those people reapply to come back to America and yes, get in line with people all over the world that are applying and trying to do this the correct way.”
Scarborough noted that former President Joe Biden allowed the illegal immigrant population to balloon to 14 million during his presidency. Scarborough predicted that the Trump administration is “never, ever going to match those numbers by the sort of brutish tactics that we have seen unfold in this country over the last nine months.”
“The administration has got to find a better way moving forward,” Scarborough said.
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This segment comes as other Fox News hosts have also suggested a change in ICE’s tactics. Host Brian Kilmeade floated the idea of sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to calm things down three times on the morning President Donald Trump announced he would send Homan.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security more than doubled the cash incentive for illegal immigrants to leave the United States through a self-deportation process, raising the offer from $1,000 to $2,600.
