White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sat down with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace on Sunday, and she made the White House's case that Democrats, not President Trump, were the intransigent party in the negotiations to end the government shutdown. Trump isn't demanding just a wall, she argued, but the wall is a huge part of the "border security" the Democrats say they support. Wallace seemed skeptical, and he took special issue with the idea, put forward by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, that thousands of "special interest aliens" are stopped at the southern border each year.
"Special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they're not terrorists themselves," Wallace noted, adding that the State Department says "quote, 'there was no credible evidence' of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico." Sanders replied that "we know that, roughly, nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border." Wallace cut her off, saying that statistic refers to people detained at airports.
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