Fusion anchor Jorge Ramos on Tuesday night challenged President Barack Obama to explain whether or not he changed his mind on halting deportations for some undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
Ramos surfaced some of Obama’s past statements saying he couldn’t use executive authority to act on immigration, while the President argued he never flip-flopped on the issue. The interview got testy at times as the two talked over each other.
“If you, as you’re saying, always had the legal authority to stop deportations, then why did you deport 2 million people?” Ramos asked. “For six years you did it. You destroyed many families. They called you deporter-in-chief.”
“You called me deporter-in-chief,” Obama shot back.
Ramos told the President that it was actually an activist group that used the moniker and repeated that Obama could have stopped those deportations if he wanted to.
“That is not true,” Obama responded.
“And those, like you sometimes Jorge, who suggest there are simple quick answers to these problems, I think –” he continued.
“I never said that,” Ramos interrupted.
“Yes, you do. That’s how you present it,” Obama said. “When you present it in that way, it does a disservice because it makes the assumption that the political process is one that can easily be moved around depending on the will of one person, and that’s not how things work.”
He emphasized that the executive actions he’d already taken were neither permanent nor applicable to all undocumented immigrants, and asked Ramos to make sure immigrants “understand what their opportunities are” and how to take advantage of the orders.
Watch below via Fusion:
Again it doesn’t appear Obama got grilled. Instead The “griller” got grilled. But we know TPM needs click bait to get out attention/. Obama s the coolest guy on the planet. He never loses his cool even when he’s making his point.
Way to go Obama.
OHbUMMer got ServED whEN preSEnted wITH hiS fLip-FLoppery. Embarrassing FLIP-FLOP on ILLEgal ExecUTIVE aCtION that FLOUTS the Constitution.
Maybe…but there is a larger meme going on here which I think you are missing.
While republicans are seemingly going out of there way to alienate the Hispanic vote, that’s a far cry from Democrats actively bringing them into the fold. They are quite aware that they are being used a political toy right now, and don’t particularly appreciate it. Its just that right now, Democrats are slightly better option for them getting the agenda met because republicans would just as soon pack them up and ship them out of the country as listen to them. Witness Paul’s rapid retreat from lunch when confronted by brown people.
We had a golden opportunity after 2012 to lock them down hard as Democrats for generations. And instead we let republicans take the spotlight in hopes they would hang themselves. Predictably, they did of course, but that WAS a gamble, and the only “win” was the one we got…no IR bill passed and republicans looked like the xenophobes they are. That was NOT the victory Hispanics were looking for.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, but Obama didn’t exactly get “grilled” and I think he did a good job of explaining the realities to Ramos.
Yeah yeah, yeah.