Far-right pundit Ann Coulter, who has been criticizing President Trump for what she sees as a failure to live up to his anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric, told a conservative radio host on Tuesday that Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops to the southern border is insufficient because “what are they going to do, shoot the illegals?” She added that just the presence of troops on the border won’t be a deterrent to immigrants “unless they’re going to shoot one and send a message to the rest.”
After discussing Coulter’s Oval Office meeting with Trump last summer, when she reportedly berated the president for abandoning his promises to his anti-immigrant base, conservative radio host Lars Larson asked Coulter if Trump’s recent decision is “a start in the right direction.”
“I don’t think so,” she responded, “what are they going to do, shoot the illegals? I mean, both Obama and Bush did this too. No, there’s a reason the chant was ‘we want a wall,’ we don’t want to use the military to process illegals and let them into the country.”
Larson suggested that even having the National Guard doing drills at the border could discourage people from crossing the border. “If you have the military patrolling up and down the most vulnerable or most crossed parts of that border, that itself is a visual deterrent to crossing, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I don’t know, we’ll see, if I were an illegal—I mean, unless they’re going to shoot one and send a message to the rest, as Voltaire’s line in Candide is—‘We hang one to encourage the others’—if you shoot one to encourage the others, maybe they’ll learn, but otherwise, we’ll see, we’ll see,” Coulter replied.
She added that “the president better understand we don’t want the military doing what they did under Obama and Bush” when those presidents deployed the National Guard to support the Border Patrol because “we don’t’ need the military doing La Raza’s work for it here.”
