Ted Cruz Chides Megyn Kelly for Question on Illegal Immigrants

Megyn Kelly returned to the Kelly File last Monday after an eleven day break from her show, and she’s made some headlines over the decision to interview, and purportedly “bond” with, Jorge Ramos after he was escorted from a Trump presser after demanding that his question be answered out of turn.

In an interview with Ted Cruz, Kelly asked:  “If you have a husband and wife who are illegal immigrants, and they have two children here who are American citizens – would you deport all of them? Would you deport the American citizen children?”.

Cruz was not willing to address the question as framed, and instead, he accused her of asking a question that “every mainstream media liberal journalist wants to ask” and one that “Barack Obama wants to focus on.”

Watch:

He has a point.  One of the reasons that there has been no action on illegal immigration for decades is not that there are tough questions to consider—such as what to do with the children of illegal immigrants who were born and / or raised here—but the fact that these questions tend to take center stage in any debate about closing the border or other piecemeal approaches to immigration reform.  This, in turn, causes a stalemate that perpetuates the status quo and gives both sides something on which to campaign.

In an attempt to break this stalemate, Cruz wants to take incremental steps that prioritize and address the questions associated with illegal immigration and immigration reform.  He states that he wants to start with the place where there is bipartisan support, and secure the border before having a debate about what happens next.  Stopping the influx of illegal immigrants needs to be done first, he states.

This interaction between Cruz and Kelly prompted the folks over at Salon to ponder whether Trump has “made it okay for all candidates to blow her off”:

So now Megyn Kelly is a RINO squish intent on doing the liberal media’s dirty work. The same Megyn Kelly who once insisted that Santa Claus, a fictional person (spoiler, sorry), is a white man. The same Megyn Kelly who prattled on for months, maybe years, about how the Obama administration was in cahoots with The New Black Panther Party. Yadda yadda yadda, and so on and so forth. She is now considered an accomplice to the left-wing’s hate crimes, and Barack Obama’s dastardly plan to transform the American fabric.It makes you wonder what sort of mail Fox News has been getting about Megyn Kelly. That Trump has been trashing her for so long, and the best her coworkers and boss can do is tweet a few cowardly lines asking him to pwease, pwease stop, Mr. Trump, pwease, suggests that Fox’s audience has sided with Trump on this one and has lost a certain amount of faith in Megyn Kelly.What Trump’s campaign has done, then, is give other candidates an excuse to blow off questions from Megyn Kelly.

Trump and Cruz are not, of course, the first Republican presidential candidates to tangle with Kelly or to take Fox News hosts and debate moderators to task for asking “gotcha questions,” and I doubt they will be the last.

Tags: 2016 Republican Primary, Fox News, Immigration, Ted Cruz

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