Not even MSNBC’s Chris Hayes can pin KJP down on Biden’s border policy: ‘Those are rumors’

When confronted by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to confirm or deny reports that the Biden administration is planning on detaining illegal alien families.

“There were reports that the White House was considering – or the Department Homeland Security was considering – reintroducing the practice of family detention, something that was tried and then abandoned by Barack Obama in 2014, 2015,” Hayes said to the press secretary during a discussion this Friday between the two.

Watch:

“[It] was harshly criticized by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, has been roundly criticized by human rights lawyers, medical officials who have to deal with this as inhumane, as causing damage to children who are held with their families. Is it true that that’s being considered?” he then asked.

Right off the bat, Jean-Pierre became defensive, saying she refused to respond to so-called “rumors.”

“So, what I want to be very clear here – and I’ve answered this question as you know, Chris, many times in the briefing room, and we as an administration have as well – we are not gonna certainly comment on rumors or conversations that are out there that people are reporting on,” she said.

“Those are rumors. What we are going to promise is that we’re going to do this – we’re going to move forward with a, with this kind of systems, immigration system, that has been gutted, really, truly gutted by the last administration,” she added.

FYI, the Trump administration did NOT gut America’s immigration system. If anything, the administration fixed it, thus helping drastically reduce border crossings into the United States.

But once in office, current President Joe Biden, a Democrat, reversed nearly all the Trump-era policies and even offered amnesty to 30,000 migrants per month.

Hayes eventually cut in to try, once more, to procure a real answer from Jean-Pierre.

“Just to follow up on that, I think if I said, ‘Are you gonna do child separation again?’ you’d say, ‘No, we’re not gonna do child separation,’ right? I mean, so it just seems like you could say like, ‘We’re not gonna do family detention.’ But you’re not saying that, which is fine as far as it goes, but I just want to be clear,” he said.

His point was that if the reports were untrue, then all the press secretary would have to do is say so. It’d be as easy as that. Yet once again, she refused to answer, choosing instead to once more fall back on her “rumors” refrain.

“I think what you’re asking me, Chris, is to speak to rumors that are out there, and that is not something that we’re going to speak to any rumored conversation. The moment that I talk about rumors or conversations that are out there, then it opens up a whole other conversation. So just wanna be mindful of that,” she said.

There was just one problem. The questioning from Hayes pertained to an Associated Press report published Tuesday revealing that the administration “is considering detaining migrant families who cross into the U.S. illegally as it prepares to end COVID-19 restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“Homeland Security officials are working through how to manage an expected increase of migrants at the border once the COVID-19 restrictions that have been in place since 2020 are lifted in May. Detention is one of several ideas under discussion and nothing has been finalized, the officials said,” the AP reported.

“If families were detained, they would be held for short periods of time, perhaps just a few days, and their cases expedited through immigration court, one official said. The officials were unauthorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity,” the AP added.

The AP isn’t exactly in the business of publishing mindless rumors, no? And indeed, open-borders leftists were infuriated by the press secretary’s word games:

As noted earlier, once in office, Biden reversed nearly all of his predecessor’s immigration policies, thus unleashing a flood of migrants across the southern border.

Over time, however, he’s slowly but surely been reinstituting these policies precisely because they work, despite Democrats’ longtime claims that they don’t.

In February, for example, the administration announced a new “Trump-esque asylum policy,” as reported by Politico.

“The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice on Tuesday announced a proposed rule that will bar some migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they cross the border illegally or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country,” according to the outlet.

The irony is that the administration could have just kept the Trump-era rules in place and avoided years of the border being flooded. But evidently, they had to learn their lesson the hard way …

Vivek Saxena

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