Univison anchor Jorge Ramos appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night to discuss his new book, and sparks quickly flew on the subject of immigration, particularly illegal immigration.
Ramos’s book is called “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era,” with its cover featuring a heated exchange he had with President Trump in which the President told Ramos to “sit down” and “go back to Univision.”
Ramos didn’t get to discuss the book much, though. Right off the bat, Hannity had to press Ramos to answer a simple question: whether or not he supports deporting criminal illegal aliens (yes, I realize how redundant a statement that is).
Ramos said: “Let me just say that the vast majority of immigrants and the vast majority of documented immigrants, Sean, are not criminals. As a matter of fact, all the reports I’ve seen and the reports that I’ve read clearly conclude that they are less likely…to be criminals and to be behind bars…”
Hannity then interjected to tell Ramos that he didn’t need to hear his talking points.
“I’m not here to defend criminals,” Ramos then clarified. But, he added that President Trump’s policies appear to criminalize an entire race, which doesn’t make any sense, because “illegal immigrant” isn’t a race.
At numerous times throughout the interview, Ramos greatly underestimated the rate at which illegal aliens commit crimes. While he claimed that illegals commit crimes at rates lower than the average American (yes, he really says that), a new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center used a previously untapped data set from Arizona that detailed criminal convictions and found that illegal immigrants between 15 and 35 are less than 3 percent of the state’s population, but nearly 8 percent of its prison population. The study concluded by stating, “If undocumented immigrants committed crime nationally as they do in Arizona, in 2016 they would have been responsible for over 1,000 more murders, 5,200 rapes, 8,900 robberies, 25,300 aggravated assaults, and 26,900 burglaries.”
And Hannity had some shocking figures of his own to share. Citing his own 2014 trip to the U.S./Mexico border, he told Ramos that he learned in a briefing by then-Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry that there were “642,000 crimes committed by illegal immigrants against Texans alone” between October 2008 and July 2014.
Ramos didn’t really have much to say to rebut that other than that he had “other numbers.”
Watch below:
Did you enjoy that interview? Tell us what you thought below!
