‘Don’t Act Shocked!’ Joe Scarborough Throttles House Republican for Trump Deportation 180
Joe Scarborough tore into Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) on Tuesday after the Republican, who recently accused President Donald Trump of having “betrayed” Hispanic voters with his immigration crackdown, shifted the focus to advisers she said were steering the president wrong.
The Morning Joe host argued that Republicans now recoiling from the administration’s deportation push could hardly claim they were blindsided after Trump campaigned explicitly on removing millions of undocumented immigrants.
“I hope that everybody will sit back and listen to what the politicians are saying this year, because I’m getting a little tired of hearing politicians who are now scared because of the extremism in this immigration policy, saying, ‘Oh, I never saw this coming. I had no idea this is going to – I voted for him three times and they took my wife away. How could they? I’m so shocked. I’m so stunned.’ No!” Scarborough said.
He then aimed directly at Salazar, whose South Florida district has put immigration at the center of her reelection fight.
“Let me say it again for the congresswoman in Miami, Donald Trump, just a year and a half ago on the campaign trail, in a speech you certainly must have heard, promised not just deporting the worst of the worst, he promised millions and millions of people being deported, and that it would be a, quote, bloody deportation.”
“And here we are. So please don’t act shocked, stunned, and deeply saddened because you’re not,” he added.
Trump’s actual remark came at a September 2024 rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, where he said removing undocumented immigrants would be a “bloody story.” Later that month in Michigan, he separately vowed to begin “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Salazar drew national attention last week with a campaign ad saying Hispanics who helped elect Trump in 2024 “feel betrayed” and that his enforcement efforts had “gone too far.”
But on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, she praised Trump as “very courteous” and “very receptive” during a later conversation and instead argued that “some of his advisers are compromising his legacy.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski joined Scarborough in pointing to Salazar’s support for the administration’s agenda: “Mass deportations like you’ve never seen before. He used the word bloody, and the congresswoman continued to fund this very effort that was underway and proven to be dangerous, terrifying, and even deadly.”
Watch above via MS NOW.
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