Nicolle Wallace said the “lies” propping up the Trump administration’s “brutal” mass deportation campaign were “laid bare in public” when a lawmaker confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a House hearing on Thursday.
During his questioning of Noem, Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner asked the secretary how many veterans her agency had deported as part of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Noem told Magaziner that they had not “deported U.S. citizens or military veterans” — only for the Rhode Island Democrat to introduce Sae Joon Park, who joined the hearing via video call. The Purple Heart recipient and green card holder had self-deported to South Korea earlier this year due to a removal order.
The “Deadline: White House” host said Noem “was confronted with the impact of mass deportation,” which does not target only the “worst of the worst” but, Wallace said, has also derailed the lives of “the best of the best, the people we are, by and large, as Americans, proud to call our fellow Americans.”
Magaziner also confronted Noem with the brutal June arrest and detention of Narciso Barranco, a father of three U.S. Marines. Immigration agents tackled the 48-year-old while he was working a landscape job outside an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. One of his sons, Alejandro Barranco, was in the hearing room on Thursday.
After Noem heard the elder Barranco’s story and was asked whether she would consider granting him parole to stay in the U.S., the secretary responded, “This is an opportunity to remind everybody that every person that’s in this country illegally has an opportunity to voluntarily go home, come back the right way, again.”
“Unbelievable,” the MS NOW host said after playing a clip of the exchange.
Although Wallace said that many are already aware of “the heinous nature” of Trump’s mass deportation campaign and “the terror that they’re intentionally creating in communities all over our country,” she argued that Noem’s testimony on Thursday reflects the administration’s new low: “the intentional deportation of veterans of the United States military.”
You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”