On Saturday's AM Joy on MSNBC, Joy Reid hosted a panel that was predictably not happy with the Trump administration's plan to keep illegal immigrant families together until their court cases are concluded as Reid claimed that the detention centers would amount to a "gulag." Separate them, you're a despot! Keep them united, you're a despot! Heads you lose, tails I win. Welcome to MSNBC.
If that's not atrocious enough, correspondent Mariana Atencio seemed to blame the U.S. for the "humanitarian problems" in Latin America, including her home country of Venezuela which is in a shambles because it elected a socialist government almost 20 years ago.
As the segment began near the end of the show, Reid recalled that the Trump administration is attempting to push a plan that would allow illegal immigrants to be detained with their children indefinitely until their asylum cases are decided, rather than turn them loose into the interior of the country. The MSNBC host turned to the ACLU's Lee Gelernt and fretted: "How can it be legal to detain migrant families indefinitely?"
After the ACLU attorney argued that keeping illegal immigrants in detention centers indefinitely is unconstitutional, Reid likened the facilities to Soviet-era prisons as she injected: "And into essentially a gulag."
After Atencio fretted that some companies would make money off the administration's plans to detain more illegal immigrants, Reid cracked: "Surprise, surprise -- somebody's going to make a lot of money on this policy."
The MSNBC host then asked Atencio to explain why there are so many problems causing refugees to leave Latin America for the U.S., which led the MSNBC correspondent to oddly suggest the U.S. deserves some of the blame:
The gang violence -- it is a humanitarian crisis. I come from a country -- Venezuela -- that is facing a humanitarian crisis now. The U.S. has really left a power vacuum in the region -- and instead of addressing the root causes, we're just saying we're not going to let these people who are essentially refugees and have an international right to seek asylum come to our borders.
Not mentioned was that, even during the Obama administration, about 75 percent of asylum requests by immigrants from Central American countries were already being rejected.
