Meet a conservative radio host who's not above making fun of sick children.
Conservative media personality Laura Ingraham mocked undocumented immigrant children and teenagers from Central America on her radio show Tuesday, using a slogan from Taco Bell ads to poke fun at them for refusing food they said made them sick.
The consul of Honduras is saying that the illegal immigrant children are complaining to the consulate of Honduras that the burritos and eggs they are being given in their holding areas are making them sick. So they're complaining about the food. I bet there are a lot of American kids who would like free food before they go to bed at night.
Her counterintuitive portrayal of impoverished Central American migrants as spoiled for refusing food that allegedly made them ill were immediately followed by a recording of the "Yo Quiero Taco Bell" campaign slogan from the 1990s.
Ingraham's Taco Bell comments came after a rambling statement that attempted to meld her love of children and her opposition to illegal immigration into a coherent system of thought, but instead collapsed into a nonsensical sentence fragment.
I love children. Of course there are wonderful children. I remember the children in the Iraqi orphanages that I visited, that I had to leave behind, that I wanted to bring to the United States, but they wouldn't let me adopt any of them. I remember those children. Heart broke for them. But we have something going on here that is profound, and our sovereignty, our rule of law, our financial resources, our military bases.
A surge in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing illegally from Mexico this year has been described as a "urgent humanitarian situation" by the Obama administration. Border officials expect to apprehend 60,000 unaccompanied minors by the end of this fiscal year -- up from 24,668 in fiscal year 2013, according to The Washington Post.
Minors from countries other than Mexico cannot be immediately repatriated when caught crossing illegally, so the sudden influx has overwhelmed the federal government's capacity to shelter them.
Hear the clip recorded by Media Matters above.
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