Fox News Host Laura Ingraham Faces Backlash for Calling Immigrant Detention Centers 'Summer Camps'

Fox News host Laura Ingraham has drawn the ire of social media after referring to immigration detention centers as “essentially summer camps” for children being separated from their families at the border.

On Monday’s episode of The Ingraham Angle, the host advocated for President Trump’s controversial “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has thus far split up more than 2,000 families at the southern border.

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“The president is now doing what we should have been doing all along: prosecuting all border crashers,” Ingraham said. “Consistent with American law, when a party is arrested, your children are either sent to relatives or they become wards of the state. Since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps.” (For the record, more than 1,400 immigrant children are currently being kept in a former Walmart superstore in Texas.)

Not long after Ingraham’s comments aired, the hashtag #BoycottLaura began circulating on Twitter, and Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan — who has an overall deal with 20th Century Fox — said he is “disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with Fox News.”

Levitan’s tweet also referenced The Orville star Seth MacFarlane, who recently criticized Fox News host Tucker Carlson for urging his viewers not to trust “the big news stations” and to “always assume the opposite of whatever they’re telling you.” MacFarlane tweeted on Saturday that “it’s business like this that makes me embarrassed to work for this company.”

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Later in the broadcast, Ingraham acknowledged the negative reception to her comments and clarified them, saying that she will instead compare the detention centers to boarding schools, as that was the comparison made by The San Diego Union-Tribune.

She then brought up the subject of adoption in the United States, saying, “We should make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids, who are true candidates for adoption, because our policies don’t allow that. So let’s put our hearts out there for the kids in the right way. Take care of them the right way. Open your hearts and your homes to them.”

This is not the first time Ingraham has been in hot water this year. In March, multiple sponsors pulled ads from her show after she mocked David Hogg, a survivor of the deadly shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, for getting rejected by four colleges. She later apologized for the insensitive tweet, but Hogg did weigh in on Ingraham’s “summer camp” comment on Tuesday morning:

Fox News responded to the controversy on Tuesday with a statement: “Laura Ingraham’s very personal, on-the-ground commitment to the plight of impoverished and abandoned children — specifically in Guatemala — speaks for itself. So too does her strong belief in a commonsense, legal immigration system, which will continue to be a focus of her show. FOX News will never tolerate or give in to attempts to silence diverse viewpoints by agenda-driven intimidation efforts.”

Your thoughts on Ingraham’s immigration comments? Watch her full segment on Trump’s policy above, then drop a comment below with your reactions.

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