CNN anchor Jim Acosta scolded Latino voters who helped propel President-elect Donald Trump to victory this election, saying they had voted "against their own self-interests" because of Trump's plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the country.
"A lot of folks are wondering why Latinos would vote for Donald Trump if that means he would deport abuela, he might deport other members of their household?" Acosta asked his panel on Thursday. "A lot of folks are asking on the Democratic side, why would they do this to themselves?"
"Hispanic-majority counties on average shifted toward Trump by 10 points" since the 2020 election, according to the New York Times. Trump also became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to flip Miami-Dade County in Florida, one of the largest Latino communities in the nation.
Acosta badgered his Latino Trump-supporting guest, Luis Figueroa, vice chair for the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, telling him that he had voted to "round up" Latinos and put them in camps.
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"On mass deportations, you are a Trump supporter," Acosta told Figueroa. "Donald Trump, people around him, have talked about mass deportations on a scale that we have not seen since the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower was president. He had a program at that time called, and I’m just saying this is the name of the program, I’m not using this term, but they called it Operation Wetback and during that program, there were even some U.S. citizens who just looked Latino who were deported at that time. Do you want to see that happen?"
Figueroa accused the Democratic Party of using the border crisis as a "political tool" instead of addressing the issue when Vice President Kamala Harris was the "border czar," prompting Acosta to cut in.
"Luis, I have to fact-check you," Acosta said. "She was not made the border czar. We have to have the facts here, and that is factually inaccurate."
After briefly defending his statement, Figueroa continued: "Once she was in charge of that or the vice president of the country, she could have solved the problem in three years. The first two years they had Congress, the Senate and the presidency. They didn’t solve the problem. So they want to use the issue as a political tool for the Americans to vote for them and it back[fired]."
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Acosta interrupted to press his guest again on whether he supported mass deportations.
"Sorry, I don’t mean to cut you off, I definitely want to have a civil discussion, you know, but my question was whether you wanted to see mass deportations? Do you want to see mass deportations?" he asked.
"The first thing we have to do is close the border. More than 10 million people illegally enter the country. There has to be deportation," Figueroa responded. "There is no other way around [it]."
"Deportation camps?" Acosta cut in as his guest said there needs to be "respect for the law."
"No, no I'm not saying deportation camps," Figueroa started to respond.
"Do you want to see people in camps, rounded up and put in camps? Isn’t that what you voted for?" Acosta said as his guest shook his head in disagreement.
"Isn't that what you voted for?" Acosta pressed.
"There are in camps now, more than 300,000 children are missing, so they are in camps now," Figuerora responded.
Acosta ended the segment by suggesting Latino voters had fallen for misinformation in order to vote for Trump.
"One of the things I think we need to talk about is whether or not folks just had the wool pulled over their eyes. Maybe they were voting on economic issues but at the end of the day, maybe voting against their own self-interests," he said.
"I had to press Luis on this issue of mass deportations. I don't think a lot of Latinos in this country have really come to grips with what that might look like. We have not seen something like that happen in a very long time," he continued.
"It's one thing to talk about mass deportations and hold up a sign at a political convention," Acosta added. "But when the cameras are rolling and people are being rounded up en masse and put on buses or whatever and sent off to camps, obviously there could be a very different reaction in this country."
