‘Lawless and Immoral!’ Senate Democrat Tussles With Fox News Anchor Over ICE Deportation Methods

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was dubious when Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream asked about border czar Tom Homan’s attempt to “turn down the temperature” in Minneapolis by wanting to arrest migrants in jails and not on the streets.

“I mean, come on!” Murphy exclaimed on Sunday’s show. “We’re still pretending that ICE is going after dangerous people? They aren’t. Right now, 70% of the people that they are detaining have no criminal record. What is happening —”

“But, DHS says 70% of those they’re arresting…do have some kind of criminal record,” Bream countered.

“What is happening in Minnesota right now is a dystopia,” Murphy said. “ICE is tear gassing elementary schools, it is disappearing legal residents into cars, murdering American citizens. ICE is making this country less safe, not more safe today. That is an emergency.”

Murphy continued, “The Constitution is being abandoned by this administration right now as we speak. And so, our focus over the next two weeks has to be reining in a lawless and immoral immigration agency in this nation.”

Bream mentioned cities where she said state and local law enforcement were working with ICE, instead of against it — which she cited as the reason why there have been no televised protests in those locations.

Murphy contended that was actually because “the law is being violated very quietly in other places.”

“In Texas, they’re violating people’s rights every day,” Murphy said. “They’re locking up hundreds and hundreds of children. They are traumatizing two-year-olds and five-year-olds for no reason. I sat inside an immigration court and watched a legal residents coming in applying for asylum, playing by the rules, and then getting disappeared out of the courtroom by ICE with absolutely no explanation.

“So it is true that we are watching the worst of the worst in Minneapolis, but it should concern every citizen that there are legal immigrants in this country — tens of thousands of legal immigrants — who are doing at the right way, who are applying for asylum, who are being disappeared into horrific prisons across the country, and because our eyes aren’t trained on a place like Texas doesn’t mean the violation of the law throughout the country is something we should excuse.”

Bream took issue with Murphy’s use of the word “disappearing,” saying, “there is a way to track people” who are detained.

On Sunday, ICE released five-year-old Liam Canejo Ramos and his father from custody in compliance with a U.S. District Judge’s court order that read, in part: “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”

A separate federal judge ruled Saturday that the Trump administration’s deportation raids could continue in Minneapolis.

Watch the clip above via Fox News Sunday.

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