Crockett managed to come up with a new excuse for her party’s refusal to confront illegal immigration: ignorance of the law.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at Representative Jasmine Crockett’s latest absurdities and cover more media misses.
Jasmine Crockett Keeps the Lies Coming
Representative Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) managed to come up with a new excuse for her party’s refusal to confront illegal immigration: Ignorance of the law.
Crockett, who is ostensibly employed by the American people as a legislator, is apparently unaware of the existence of 8 U.S.C. 1325, which says improper entry into the U.S. is considered a federal misdemeanor punishable by fines and up to six months in jail for first-time offenders, or fines and up to two years in prison for repeat offenders.
Crockett proudly displayed her ignorance during a House committee hearing on sanctuary city policies last week, arguing that illegally entering the country was not a “crime” but a “civil accusation.”
Apparently, a producer for The Katie Phang Show on MSNBC was so impressed with Crockett’s legal acumen that she decided the Texas Democrat should be given the opportunity to share her perspective with a wider audience.
Appearing on the program, Crockett argued that Republicans “are so outraged by these immigrants and the crime that they’re bringing. And not to mention, city law enforcement, local law enforcement, they are always going after crime. And they don’t say, ‘oh, you committed a murder, oh, but you’re an immigrant. Well, let me let you go.’ Right? So they are always focused on crime.”
“They continue to say things like ‘the illegals’ and that they broke the law coming in,” she said. “But what they’re not telling the American people is that it is a civil violation. It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally. It’s not. It’s not criminal. It’s not a crime. It’s not a crime.”
“Which is why they’re so frustrated,” she went on, “because they really want our local law enforcement to go out and round up people when they could be looking out for the murderers and the sexual abusers, as well as the robbers. They want them to go and round people up on civil accusations.”
Not content with misleading the public on a fundamental question of law, Crockett decided to use her next public appearance to weaponize the legacy of slavery against her political opponents.
“They have decided to go after immigrants and things like that and say, ‘oh they taking your black jobs, they taking your black jobs, not really,” Crockett said during a State of the People stream shared online as counterprogramming to Trump’s joint address to Congress.
“They are obviously jobs they want us to go back to, such as working the fields, those immigrants that come into our country work the fields, something that we ain’t done in a long time and clearly he is trying to make us go back to the fields,” she said, without evidence.
Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) made similar comments during the stream, saying Trump’s education policy is a “recipe to make education unavailable to black people.”
“It puts us back to when America was ‘great’ and we were picking cotton and doing the productivity that they’re putting my Latino brothers and sisters who migrate here to do that work because we are not suited intellectually to do it anymore,” he said.
“But they would have us back, confined to doing that kind of work,” he continued. “We gotta watch out for where we are headed. It’s the people that will save our democracy that will stop this movement toward the past that Trump has us hurtling towards.”
Crockett was also one of several lawmakers featured in a Politico article about “potty mouth” Democrats who have leaned into profanity in an effort to combat Trump and connect with American voters.
“When Rep. Jasmine Crockett reacted to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening, profanity leaped effortlessly from her lips: ‘Somebody slap me and wake me the [f***] up because I’m ready to get on with it,’” the article reads. “Just a few days earlier, when asked of her message to Elon Musk, she told him to ‘[F***] off.’”
Headline Fail of the Week
CNN purported to be “fact checking Trump’s address to Congress” last week, but it was the network itself that ended up being fact-checked after it accused Trump of “falsely” claiming that $8 million was spent on “making mice transgender.”
Reporter Deidre McPhillips refuted the claim and argued that grants were given to projects that applied hormone therapy to monkeys to understand its effects on HIV treatment.
CNN was later forced to correct the fact-check, changing its rating from “falsely claimed” to “needs context” after the White House released a list of federal grants involving mice receiving gender-transition treatments.
“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender,” the fact-check was amended to read.
A correction was also added to the fact-check: “An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump’s claim about federal money being spent for ‘making mice transgender.’ The article has been updated with context about the spending, which was for research studies on the potential human health impacts of treatments used in gender-affirming care.”
Media Misses
• MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace faced backlash from both social media users and the White House last week after she saw fit to bring up January 6 and the suicide of Capitol police officers while talking about a young boy with cancer who dreams of being a police officer some day.
“But I think this was a lesson in finding one thing that you let yourself feel,” Wallace said Tuesday night after Trump invited the boy as a guest to his joint session address. “And I let myself feel joy about DJ, and I hope he’s alive for another, you know, 95 years, and I hope he lives the life he wants to live. He wants to be a cop. He knows what he wants to do, and maybe when you have childhood cancer, that crystallizes for you.”
“I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer,” she added. “But I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters, and if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide, and I hope he isn’t one who has to testify against the people who carried out acts of seditious conspiracy and then lived to see Donald Trump pardon those people.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, meanwhile, called the boy’s inclusion in the president’s speech “disgusting.”
Trump suggested they should both be forced to resign over their comments.
• Representative Al Green (D., Texas) and his allies blamed “invidious discrimination” for his removal from Trump’s speech; Green was escorted out after he refused to stop waving his cane and shouting during Trump’s remarks, despite several warnings from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Nonetheless, Representative Lateefah Simon (D., Calif.) claimed the U.S. is “going back to a 1950s America,” citing Green’s removal as evidence. “I want to be very clear about that. For those of us who have parents, who have aunts and uncles and communities that are still alive, who remembered what a Jim Crow America looks like tonight in the chamber, you could look easily to your right, and you could see essentially a monolithic group of folks who look just like one another. And then you went to the left side, and you would see what America truly looks like, a beautiful tapestry of all of us who pray differently, who look differently, who come from four corners of the globe to make this country what it is. We know what we all deserve.”
“I got to say, as a new member of Congress, I was shocked at what seemed like a blatant disrespect for the House, and it wasn’t coming from Rep. Green,” she said. “It was coming from the men behind him on the right side who were telling him and yelling, ‘Sit down!’ I mean, it felt like I was watching something in a history class of racist yelling at an elderly Black man challenging the President of the United States not to cut medical care for the sick.”