Things got very awkward, if also very entertaining, when Democratic Pennsylvania congressional candidate Ala Stanford was asked a basic question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and who should be in charge of immigration enforcement in America, and ended up crashing out after a nearly half-minute pause in which she struggled to come up with an answer.
Such came when Stanford was being interviewed by NBC 10 Philadelphia reporter Lauren Mayk. Mayk asked Stanford, who has now repeatedly called to abolish ICE, who should be in charge of immigration enforcement if ICE isn’t doing it. Stanford couldn’t give an answer to the question, and indeed struggled to even spit out anything approaching an answer.
Mayk, posing the question that led to the absurd moment, asked Stanford, in the context of a discussion about ICE and immigration, “From an immigration enforcement perspective, who do you think should be in charge of enforcing immigration laws?”
Stanford didn’t give a response. At first, she just sat silently, then she haltingly muttered a bit while requesting that Mayk pause the interview so she could think about it, which Mayk refused to do.” She said, “It’s a good question. And you can pause because I just want to think about it for a minute…”
At that point, which came after an excruciating period of time in which Stanford just froze and gave no response, Mayk said they could not pause and had to keep the interview going, which just led to more nearly incoherent rambling from Stanford, who said, “Okay … Who do I think should be in charge of enforcing immigration laws? Not the executive branch. So not the president, so it belongs with Congress. It belongs with Congress.”
“It belongs with Congress because the executive branch, and specifically the president, is self-serving and many of the decisions that he is making is not about the American people, is not about our safety,” Stanford then said, continuing to ramble while getting the details about running the American government wrong.
Mayk wasn’t having it, and wasn’t having Stanford’s non-response to a basic question about a very important issue. “But who should be on the ground enforcing?” Mayk then asked. Mayk continued, “I mean there are immigration laws absolutely in this country and a border. If it’s not ICE, if you’ve abolished ICE, who handles it?”
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Stanford gave another absurd answer, at that point insisting that ICE should be abolished so that something else could be rebuilt from it, but that ICE couldn’t be salvaged. She said, “So you can’t — once you abolish, you have to rebuild. We’re at a point where you can’t reform something that is a paramilitary organization that is taking human life.”
Stanford also claimed that whatever is rebuilt should have a different name because “ICE” is too mean and has too many negative connotations, saying, “I’m saying that I wouldn’t even use that. I think at this point the connotation of that word is so negative that you would need a new name.”
Still not done, Stanford then claimed that what America really needs is to let in more migrants, saying, “People who come to this country add value and diversify and have helped build the United States. When they’re fleeing to come to the United States, it’s supposed to be a sanctuary, not a living hell.”
Watch the excruciating interview here: