Immigration in the US has gone “too far”, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has claimed. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference yesterday evening, Clinton, who was the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, stated that “there is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” which she said had been “disruptive and destabilising”.

During the panel event, titled “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values”, the American politician said that while immigration “went too far”, it “needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people”. She added that debates over rights should be “carried out without intimidation, fear, bullying and cancellation”.

Clinton’s comments come following a nationwide backlash to raids carried out by US immigration officers under the Trump administration. These protests intensified in the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the beginning of the year in Minneapolis, before Alex Pretti died at the hands of US Customs and Border Protection officers a fortnight later in the same city. Clinton claimed in January that Good had been “murdered”, and said that “in the face of this administration’s lawless violence, solidarity is the answer.”

Speaking in Munich yesterday, Clinton argued that “more people were deported under my husband [former US president Bill Clinton] and Barack Obama, without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps, than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump’s second term.”

Between 1993 and 2001, during Bill Clinton’s two terms in the White House, over 12 million people were deported. During Obama’s tenure from 2009-17, there were 5 million deportations. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security claimed earlier this week: “In President Trump’s first year back in office, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the US because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.” Of this figure, roughly 675,000 were deported, while there were an estimated 2.2 million “self-deportations”. During the four years of Trump’s first term, fewer than a million deportations were recorded.

Despite serving in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton has previously criticised the former president’s use of immigrant detention facilities, saying that the practice could be “more humane”. While running for the presidency in 2016, she pledged to scale back immigration raids, which she argued produce “unnecessary fear and disruption in communities”. She was also consistently critical of Trump’s immigration policies during his first term, saying in 2018 that “there’s nothing American about tearing families apart.” That same year, she posted on social media: “It is now the official policy of the US government — a nation of immigrants — to separate children from their families. That is an absolute disgrace.”

In an interview with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen published yesterday, Obama expressed support for anti-ICE demonstrators in Minneapolis, referring to immigration officers’ actions as “unprecedented”. At the same time, he added, “we’re a nation of laws, we have borders, and we’ve got to figure out an immigration policy that is orderly and that is fair and is enforced in a sensible way that is compatible with our values.” The former president added: “we’ve got to accommodate the reality that the majority of American people think that there’s a difference between somebody who’s a US citizen and somebody who’s not.”

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is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

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