Ben Carson on Tuesday called it the “height of hypocrisy” for the United States to ask Turkey to seal its border with Syria to keep Islamic State fighters out of the country, since the U.S. has failed to control the southern border with Mexico.
Appearing on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday after his trip to the Middle East, Carson told host Steve Doocy that the U.S.’s southern border, like the Turkey/Syria border, is “completely porous.”
“Yes, it would be good to seal off the border so that there wasn’t such a flow of people into the ranks of ISIS, but by the same token, you look at our border, it is completely porous,” Carson said.
“Terrorists can come here also. I’ve been down there. I mean, I was astonished by how little protection there is and all of the drugs that are coming through,” Carson continued. “So for us to sit there and proclaim sanctimoniously that you should close your border while we haven’t done that to protect the American people seems to me the height of hypocrisy.”
The former neurosurgeon was only days removed from a post-Thanksgiving trip to Jordan, during which he met with Syrian refugees. Carson said that the refugees he met with would ultimately like to return to their homeland eventually rather than stay in Jordan or move elsewhere.
“They were saying what they would really like the United States and other countries to do is support programs like they have in Jordan. The Jordanians are wonderful people,” Carson argued. “They’ve opened their hearts and their land, but they don’t have the money to sustain it, and consequently, there’s a brand-new hospital there that’s not even being utilized because they don’t have the money to run it.”
Carson is currently in fourth place in the Washington Examiner‘s latest power rankings.
