Stephen Miller Stumped By Wallace’s Barrage of Border Facts: ‘You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know’
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace bombarded Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller with facts that contradict Trump’s “national emergency” declaration, to which Miller could only respond with the logical fallacy “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
On this week’s edition of Fox News Sunday, Wallace began his grilling of Miller by calling out Trump’s apparent admission that the emergency isn’t really an emergency, and then he busted out the receipts.
“The president talks about an invasion, he used that word multiple times on Friday, an invasion on the southern border,” Wallace said. “But let’s look at the facts, I want to put them up on the screen.”
“1.6 million people were stopped crossing the border illegally back in 2000, less than a quarter that many were caught last year,” Wallace continued. “The government’s own numbers show, for all the president’s talk about drugs flowing over the border, 80-90% of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl seized at the border is seized at ports of entry, not along unfenced areas. And in 2017, twice as many of the new people in the country illegally were from Visa overstays as were from crossing the border. Again, where is the emergency, the national emergency to build a wall?”
Miller went into a lengthy digression bashing former President George W. Bush, before Wallace finally got him back on topic.
“Let’s just focus on one issue, four times as many people were coming across the border in 2000 as now, so why is that a national emergency?” Wallace asked.
Miller argued that it was easier to divert people back to their home countries in those days, then told Wallace “we could go down to the details, and you know I could go down to details as much as you want to…”
“Please don’t,” Wallace pleaded.
“The bottom line is this, you cannot conceive of a nation without a strong secure border,” Miller said, avoiding the question again. “It is fundamental and essential up to the idea of sovereignty and national survival to have control of who enters and doesn’t enter the country. We can get into statistics. You want to talk about drugs? There’s been a huge increase in drug deaths since George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in office.”
“I understand that, but 80 to 90% of those drugs don’t come across an un-fenced area, they come across ports of entry,” Wallace repeated. “Those are your own customs and border patrol numbers.”
Miller argued that drugs aren’t being seized in un-fenced areas because they aren’t ports of entry with huge screening resources. “You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t catch what you don’t catch,” Miller said, and claimed that building the wall is a “matter of national security” akin to building “a security perimeter in Iraq or Afghanistan or around a military installation in Syria.”
“I question whether, in fact, that’s the case,” Wallace said, then moved on to his next nailing of Miller.
Watch the clip above, via Fox.
[Image via screengrab]
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