Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK) told Tucker Carlson this week that his trip to the southern border changed his views on the wider immigration debate. The candidate stated that his views were now more aligned with the Republican Party.
Kennedy made the comments during an episode of Carlson’s new program, “Tucker on Twitter.” During the interview, Kennedy expressed shock at his border trip.
“What I saw was so extraordinary that it took me three days to even understand what I was looking at,” Kennedy said.
Ep. 16 RFK Jr. explains Ukraine, bio-labs, and who killed his uncle pic.twitter.com/RMr5VZVqSM
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 14, 2023
During the interview, he cited the Biden administration’s position on the border wall proposed by former President Donald Trump. Kennedy said that he initially agreed with the same point of view.
He said that the Biden administration believed that “any idea that Donald Trump had is a bad idea. So, they just open the border, and they’ve had the open border policy.”
“I was a person who ridiculed Trump’s wall,” Kennedy said.
He said that he was currently not supporting the wall for a “nationalistic or even a racist or a xenophobic posture,” but instead supported stronger border measures “from a place of compassion and a place of just concern for our country.”
He called the current situation a “catastrophe.”
Kennedy made the comments following a June trip to the border. The candidate said that he was surprised at the scope of those approaching the border at 2 a.m.
Out of the total of more than 100 migrants who approached the border, Kennedy said that only two were from Latin America. He relayed one family’s description of their daughters taken by smugglers and separated.
“They were the only ones who had legitimate claims of asylum,” he said. “Everybody else we talked to came for a better life.”
Following the trip and talking “to everybody down there,” Kennedy said that the country may not need a wall for every mile of the border, “but we definitely need physical barriers in densely populated areas, definitely because we cannot survive what’s happening here.”
He criticized what he called “well-meaning, mainly liberal people who care who see themselves as deeply caring people” who cause migrants to be “subject to terrible exploitation.”
