White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders continued to push the Trump administration’s false claims that terrorists pour into the U.S. across the border with Mexico, but longtime Fox News host Chris Wallace wasn’t buying it.
In a heated interview this morning, Wallace took on the claim, made by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, that thousands of “special interest aliens” have been stopped at the border.
“Let’s talk about the wall,” Wallace said. “The president talks about terrorists potentially coming across the border.”
He then showed a clip of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen stating Friday that “over 3,000 special interest aliens” trying to enter the U.S. from the southern border had been stopped by Border Patrol agents.
“But special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they’re not terrorists themselves,” Wallace said. He also cited State Department reports that found “no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico.”
Sanders responded, “We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”
Wallace, ready to pounce, interrupted Sanders with a blistering fact-check.
“Wait wait, ’cause I know the statistic,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were going to use it, but I studied up on this. Do you know where those 4,000 people come or where they’re captured? Airports. The state department says there hasn’t been any terrorists found coming across the southern border.”
Sanders then suggested that an “influx” of “terrorists” would flow through the border without increased security, such as Trump’s proposed border wall.
“I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming through airports,” she said. “I’m saying that they come by air by land and by sea, and the more and more that our border becomes vulnerable and the less and less that we spend time and money protecting it the more that we’re going to have an influx, not just of terrorists, but of human traffickers and drug inflow.”
The exchange comes as the government shutdown, which began over Trump’s request for $5 billion in funding for a wall, enters its third week.
Sanders also told Wallace that Trump “means what he says” in suggesting that the shutdown could last for months or years.
Watch the segment below.
There are already about 650 miles of fencing, including the steel fence that divides the sister cities of Nogales in Arizona and Mexico and ranges from 18 feet to 26 feet tall.
Much of the border fence was built in the past 15 years as immigration surged. The cost has been in the billions.