Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz chided Fox News star Megyn Kelly for asking what he perceived as an inappropriate question about immigration during a recent interview, going so far as to nearly accuse her of shilling for the mainstream media.
Kelly repeatedly pressed Cruz to clarify, as Mediaite reported: “Do American citizen children of two illegal immigrants … get deported under a President Cruz?”
At one point, she told the Texas tea party favorite, “You’re dodging my question.”
And Cruz’s response?
“I get that’s the question you want to ask,” he said. “That’s also the question every mainstream media journalist wants to ask.”
The exchange came after Cruz already spelled out his immigration principles at length, telling Kelly: “As a policy matter, Megyn, it doesn’t make any sense anymore, that people who are here illegally, that their children would have automatic citizenship. WÂ hat that does is it serves as an incentive encouraging people to break the law and come here illegally. And we ought to change that policy.”
He said there were a couple ways to approach the issue, but “what matters, is that we should change the policy so we’re not rewarding and incentivizing and encouraging more illegal immigration,” Breitbart reported.
Kelly then asked for his views of the 14th Amendment’s birthright clause, and bluntly: “If you have a husband and a wife who are illegal immigrants and they have two children who are here, who are American citizens, would you deport all of them? Would you deport the American citizen children?”
Cruz repeated his previous statement, that “we should approach immigration in a staged manner” and choose which path to pursue: a constitutional amendment or a congressional act to deal with any 14th Amendment discrepancy. He also said “Number one … we should do everything possible to secure the border and stop illegal immigration,” he said, Breitbart said.
And Kelly cut in to say: “That doesn’t sound like an answer.”
Cruz again tried to clarify his views, and Kelly again cut in: “You’re dodging my question. You don’t want to answer that question.”
She posed the same question again about Cruz’s plans for children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrant parents – and that’s when Cruz remarked about her “mainstream media liberal journalist” bent.
“[That’s] also the question Barack Obama wants to focus on,” Cruz said.
