Republican presidential candidate nominee Marco Rubio has attacked the mainstream media in the United States for ignoring the issue of sanctuary cities, noting that more coverage was given to the killing of a lion than to the serious issue that sees undocumented immigrants shielded from federal laws.
Rubio strongly criticized both the media and the Democratic Party in an interview on Tuesday with Newsmax TV following the failure of the bill that proposed a crackdown on such cities in the Senate, which he co-sponsored. The Florida senator lashed out at the media for basically ignoring a crucial issue in the debate over immigration and thus allowing the Democrats to vote against the enforcement of existing laws and face zero consequences.“You’ve got a mainstream media out there that spends days covering the death of a lion in Africa that an American hunter killed, but does nothing about coverage on issues like this beyond touching upon it in the first few days,” Rubio noted while appearing on The Hard Line show. “And then those of us who step out and say this is wrong, we should do something about it, we’re somehow painted as some extreme element that simply wants to enforce the laws of this country.”
Rubio grew up in a South Miami neighborhood populated largely by immigrants and his parents were from overseas, leading him to claim to have a better understanding of the issue of immigration than most. He says that jurisdictions gaining funding from federal authorities and then refusing to cooperate with them is “unacceptable and unexplainable”.