Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr recently pulled no punches on Wednesday in slamming his former boss for saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country via Mediaite.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper recently questioned Barr if he had thoughts on the former president’s highly controversial rhetoric.
“I’m offended by it because it has racist overtones,” Barr said directly, adding:
I actually feel, as you say, we have to control the border and a lot of people coming across the border from anywhere in the world. We don’t know where they’re coming from.
But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that the Hispanic Americans that have come up from South America have made great citizens. You know, they have strong values. They’re entrepreneurial. My son-in-law was a Marine combat officer, and he said the best Marines in his unit in Iraq were recent Hispanic immigrants. So I don’t like these racist overtones in the broad sweep of history.
The fact that we have a reservoir to our south of these people who come out of the Western tradition, their religious people, good family people in general, is a boon to the United States. Does that mean they all are like that? No. And does bringing in a lot of people at once from a different country, does that put strains on our system and harm the country to an extent? Yes, it does. But the attacks on the idea that they pollute our blood I think are foul.
Trump made the remarks over the weekend at a campaign rally and specifically cited those migrants coming from Africa, Asia, and South America.
Some in the GOP, like Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), have tried to claim Trump was talking about fentanyl coming over the border and poisoning Americans. “It is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic,” Vance claimed earlier this week.
But, Trump made clear on Tuesday night he was indeed talking about diversity when he doubled down on the remark, during an Iowa rally, saying, immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”
