CLAY: We’ve talked a lot about what’s going on at the border during the hours of today’s show. And the White House had a briefing with our good friend Jen Psaki. And Peter Doocy at Fox News asked her about emotionally some of these illegal immigrants giving birth, and they got into a testy exchange. Here is what it sounded like.
DOOCY: You say the border is not open, but we’re told by our teams on the ground you guys are releasing pretty much all family units, couples where the woman says that she is pregnant, or single women who say that they are pregnant, and that nobody actually has to take a pregnancy test unless they want to. So —
PSAKI: Are you suggesting you don’t believe when women say they’re pregnant? Is that a big issue, you think, at the border?
DOOCY: I am not in charge of keeping the border secured. You guys are.
PSAKI: Do you think pregnant women are posing a big threat to the border?
DOOCY: You tell me.
PSAKI: To the border community? Is that a big issue?
DOOCY: You tell me!
PSAKI: I’m not aware of pregnant women being a big area of concern to people at the border.
DOOCY: The issue is not about pregnant women. The issue is, is the border open or is the border closed? Because my understanding is that a lot of this is happening on this side of the border.
PSAKI: I think you know the answer to that question, and I just conveyed clearly that we’re implementing our border restrictions, including Title 42, including making clear that people who are coming through irregular migration, that this is not the time to come and they will be placed in removal proceedings.
BUCK: When is it the time to come illegally? I just want to know. They keep saying, “Hey, not now.”
CLAY: “This is not the time to come, yeah.
BUCK: You’re not supposed to come this way ever.
CLAY: Ever.
BUCK: The law says you never come this way. Also, credit to Peter Doocy there for keeping it cool with “Psnarky Psaki.” She’s getting real snarky up there. It’s getting a little out of hand. Look, Trump was very… He was slapping around reporters.
I’m not gonna pretend like we’re all, “Oh, the vapors! How do we handle it?” But let’s be honest here. She’s being, I think, a little disrespectful to the guy. He’s digging in, as he should, on the realities. Clay, it’s important that there are… It’s not an accident that hundreds of women have traveled thousands of miles to get to the U.S.-Mexico border.
They’re trying to have a baby on U.S. soil to get around the normal immigration system that we have. That’s the whole point. The threat? No one’s saying that they’re about to take over the Capitol building, all the pregnant women. We’re just saying, this is crazy what’s going on.
CLAY: Well, not only that, if you set the precedent that if you say you are pregnant, you are allowed into the United States, then every woman that wants to get into the United States is going to say she’s pregnant if there’s no evidence that she’s actually pregnant. That’s part one here.
Part two of this would be that basically guarantees that whichever women come in who are pregnant, their children become American citizens because, as we talked about earlier, we have birthright citizenship here.
And as you said, Buck, once you have a baby that has American citizenship, the idea of you being deported as the mother of that baby becomes incredibly unlikely, absent some crazy crime that you commit.
BUCK: And, Clay, let’s understand. It’s not only an anchor, so to speak for the mother who’s an illegal who’s in the country, but it also then becomes — just give it some time and the Democrats will say this — we need family reunification. So the husband who may be back in wherever we’re talking about now, Chile?
A Haitian immigrant who’s in Chile or Brazil, and the uncles, whoever, we need to bring the whole family in and bring the whole family together. A lot of our immigration system — now we’re actually talking about the legal immigration system — is premised upon what they call family reunification or essentially bringing a family over that has a portion of it already in the U.S.
And so when you have one kid in the country, it’s a huge leap forward. Games are being played here with the system, and we can all see it. Clay, here’s an example. When I was at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, San Diego, a while back when there was a surge going on there — this is just a few years ago — they said they had a guy who claimed to be…
Remember, then if you were under 18, you were let into the country. That was whole thing, because you were an “unaccompanied minor.” They had a guy who was 34 ’cause they actually tested him. He was 34 years old; said he was 17. Is that an unaccompanied minor? Should I cry big tears for this guy?
CLAY: No but it’s an example of what I’m talking about: Whatever rule you put in place, it will be exploited. So if your standard is, hey, if you’re a pregnant woman, you get into the country, then guess what? Every woman’s gonna claim she’s pregnant — and I don’t blame ’em for trying to exploit the system because that’s their goal here.
BUCK: Lying to federal officials is actually a crime.
CLAY: I understand.
BUCK: (laughing) It’s technically a crime.
CLAY: But if you’re able to exploit it and they can’t prove that you’re lying, then that’s the point of his question because immediately what happens? Those women come in, they get on their phones, they talk, and they say to every other woman who is interested that they are friends or family with, “Say you’re pregnant and you get in!” Eerybody’s gonna be pregnant.
BUCK: This is what they’ve been saying, that they have a credible fear of nothing specific, but they just all repeat the same things they’ve been told by cartels. Like I said, they have a printout sometimes in Spanish, “Say that you fear violence in your home country” of Honduras or El Salvador or whatever.
Those are countries that have a high homicide rate. It’s about what it is in Chicago, by the way. They’re not in the midst of a grinding civil war with a huge body counts piling up, which is usually what people think of: Syrian refugees where people fleeing after the whole village had been bombed to the ground.
And people were being executed by the shabiha thugs of the Assad regime. That’s refugee status. That’s, “I gotta get outta here or I’m gonna die. ” It’s not, “I’ll get higher wages in America than Brazil after leaving Haiti,” which is what we’re seeing now. But, Clay, the problem is people have to learn all these different games and the system and what goes on for them to really care that much about it except for the concentration of individuals. The visual of this say problem for the Biden administration.
CLAY: Which is why we’re trying to get rid of the concentrations of individuals as quickly as possible even if it means — and I think you’re right that we may well find out that this is the case on Friday — that all of these immigrants to a large extent while they’re saying, hey, we’re flying some back to Haiti, which they are…
It’s a small percentage overall. If those immigrants diffuse themselves into the larger United States population, you don’t end up with the imagery that we saw from the drones and the helicopters flying over in Del Rio, all of these people all together trying to get in the country. It disappears if they’re distributed throughout the width and breadth of the country.