‘Sounds Pretty Good’: Fox News Anchor Challenges Sarah Huckabee Sanders On GOP’s Opposition to Border Deal

Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino spoke with Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) on Monday about her recent visit to the border and the U.S. Senate’s bipartisan border deal, which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has called “dead on arrival” in the House.

As their conversation wound down, Hemmer played a clip from Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), one of the Senate’s most conservative members, defending the bill earlier in the day on Fox News.

“The key thing here is changes the asylum laws, builds more wall, adds more detention beds, adds more deportation flights, changes these ten-year backlogs that we’re currently in now to weeks before people are actually deported. That’s what the bill really does. So right now, if you walk across the border today, you can say, I have fear in my country and you’ll be released into the country for ten years. Under this bill, you walk across the border and say, I have fear in my country. They say, prove it. You’ve got to have a higher standard of evidence,” Lankford said in the clip, defending the deal he helped craft.

“If you enforce all that, it sounds pretty good on his face,” Hemmer reacted to the clip, asking Huckabee Sanders:

And the other thing he said is that it builds more wall. This is a Democratic president who would be signing this if it were to pass at a Congress in its current form, now when you spend the money on the wall is to be debated. A lot of that comes in 2025 and beyond. But just on its face, governor, what do you like about what they have done inside this bill?

“I think anything that we’re doing that makes it harder for people to just freely walk in. Right now, we have had, under this administration, completely and totally open borders. In the last month alone, they picked up more people from the terrorist watch list than they did the entire four years of Donald Trump’s presidency,” replied Huckabee Sanders, adding:

So we have to put harsher and tougher restrictions in place in the state of Arkansas. We took in and seized so much fentanyl that it would kill 2.8 million people. And that’s just in our state alone. That’s almost the entire population of Arkansas.

I’m not saying there aren’t some good merits of this legislation, but if they’re not going to take serious action at the congressional level, then Republican governors are going to continue to step up where the federal government is failing. And I’m committed to being part of that coalition of governors that will keep fighting to make sure we have a secure border.

Hemmer then asked Perino for her take on the bill, which former President Donald Trump has raged against.

“Well, there was another piece that might not sound like that important of a headline, but I thought it was interesting that if you are somebody who comes across and claims asylum, but if you are asked this question, is there some place in your own country that would be safe enough for you if they if they say no, but we know that that’s not true. That would be a way to get them out. It also says if you have a criminal record, you could immediately be deported. What’s interesting is that that’s not already the law. So there are some things in there that seem to make a lot of sense,” Perino replied.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.