CNN’s Abby Phillip Jumps In When Scott Jennings Waves Away Dead Refugee as ‘Detail’ Trump Border Patrol ‘Missed’

CNN anchor Abby Phillip jumped in when CNN GOP analyst Scott Jennings described the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam as an example of a Trump deportation force interaction in which “a detail was missed.”

The 56-year-old mostly blind refugee was detained last week by Customs and Border Patrol, then released when they determined he was a legal refugee. They dropped him off at a Tim Horton’s in the freezing cold.

After Shah Alam was found dead in Buffalo on Tuesday, Trump’s Border Patrol claimed they dropped him off at a “warm, safe location” and that he “showed no signs of distress.”

But surveillance video obtained by The Washington Post later showed the man being dropped off nearly an hour after the shop closed, and the man never made it inside. Five days later, he was found dead.

On Thursday’s edition of CNN NewsNight, Phillip was taken aback when Jennings defended the agency by citing the “thousands, if not millions, of interactions” versus the “individual interactions” in which “something goes awry, where a detail is missed.”

“This man is dead,” Phillip interrupted:

ABBY PHILLIP: Well I have a few basic questions about this.

One, you know, Border Patrol or ICE or federal agents, they were called to pick this guy up because he was about to be released on what ended up being a misdemeanor plea. Rather than checking his deportability before they picked him up, they detained him.

Now, they detained him, learned he couldn’t be deported. Why couldn’t that have been done before? Well, part of me wonders, is it because they have quotas that they have to reach in terms of people that they have to detain as part of their Stephen Miller push to hit certain numbers?

Because we’re talking about, they’re acting as if these are just individual people, but it actually seems like a broader issue with ICE and Border Patrol putting numbers on the table and saying, the more people you pick up, the more bonuses you get. The more people you pick up, the closer you get to the target that we want you to get to, regardless of whether these people are eligible for deportation or not.

SCOTT JENNINGS: Yes, I don’t have enough facts about this case to know whether what you’re alleging is true. I do know broader numbers. I saw some numbers today for the month of January, in fact, for the city of New Orleans.

Over 2,500 arrests, 10,000 deportations, 25 gang members picked up and taken off the streets. I mean, ICE is having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of interactions with people around the country. Do I think it’s reasonable to assume you’re going to have individual interactions where something goes awry, where a detail is missed, where there’s something unfortunate or bad that happens?

PHILLIP: This man is dead. He didn’t need to be dead. He was not a criminal, he was–

JENNINGS: But does that negate the need to do the hundreds of thousands of other interactions they’re having across the country?

PHILLIP: Listen, I don’t know. I think some people would say that there is a way to do this that respects human life, right? Respects the lives of people who are here trying to seek a better life, trying to do the best that they can, and doesn’t treat them as disposable. Dropping this man off outside of a closed store, they can’t even communicate with him. They acknowledge they cannot communicate with him because he is speaking a language that they don’t speak.

So rather than take him back where they picked him up, allow them to help find his relatives, they didn’t do any of that stuff. They just dropped him off in the middle of winter outside of a closed coffee shop.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.

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