MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan spent a portion of his Peacock streaming show on Tuesday suggesting that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a hypocrite for his anti-illegal immigration policies.
One segment on “The Mehdi Hasan Show” spotlighted an Italian immigrant named Luigia Colucci who moved to America in 1917, prior to stricter immigration enforcement. He suggested that she, unlike migrants today, did not have to worry about being sent to Martha’s Vineyard.
“Despite all the anti-immigration sentiment back then, America had pretty open borders compared with today. It didn’t even have a militarized Border Patrol yet and migrants like Luigia Colucci, she didn’t have to worry about being put on a plane under false pretenses and shipped thousands of miles for an anti-immigration stunt,” Hasan said.
He then revealed that Colucci was DeSantis’ great-great-grandmother and shamed the Republican governor for appearing to attack people like his own ancestor.
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“How does DeSantis feel about the fact that his family matriarch was almost barred from entry into America by the immigration hardliners of that time? How does he feel about the fact that she could be called an example of what conservatives like to denounce today as chain migration, that she had an anchor baby once she got here? DeSantis has never commented,” Hasan said.
Several media pundits have attacked DeSantis after he sent approximately 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on Sept. 14, calling the action, among other things, “cruel,” “inhumane” and “xenophobic.”
Hasan continued to attack DeSantis and other Republicans as “nativist” for promoting stricter border regulations.
“Ron DeSantis’ callous disregard for the migrants that he paid to ship to Martha’s Vineyard, that was bad enough, a level of inhumanity that should be immediately disqualifying for public office. But it’s more than that. Ron DeSantis and a whole lot of other nativist Republicans are American by virtue of the fact that their ancestors, their white European ancestors, benefited from effective open borders policies that are nothing like the immigration police state we have today and DeSantis wants to expand and harden,” Hasan said.
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He closed, “Because for DeSantis, as the saying goes, the cruelty is the point, even if it means throwing his own ancestors under the bus.”
On Hasan’s Sunday show, The Nation reporter Elie Mystal appeared as a guest to suggest that DeSantis along with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott violated federal law by moving migrants.
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“We need Merrick Garland once again to understand that and bring the full weight and power of the federal government down on these people,” Mystal said.
Fox News’ Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
