Fox’s Shep Smith Gets Emotional Over Dead Migrants: ‘When Did We Change?’

Fox News’ Shep Smith became emotional while discussing the immigration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday’s edition of Shepard Smith Reporting.

Smith started off by showing the now-famous picture of the bodies of the migrant father and his toddler daughter from El Salvador who drowned while trying to swim across the Rio Grande to Texas earlier this week. He recounted the family’s efforts to reach the border in the first place and their efforts to present themselves to U.S. authorities to ask for asylum, only to be turned away and told to wait in a “sweltering” refugee camp. Desperate, they tried to swim across the river into the United States, and lost their lives in the effort.

Under U.S. and international law, the family had the right to ask for asylum. As Smith noted:

“Of course, it is legal to present yourself for asylum in the United States. Legal under American and legal under international law. But current policies are forcing some that are desperate back home to take the chance at crossing the river. Laws criminalizing unauthorized border crossing date back about 90 years…The Trump White House has cracked down further. The administration has separated children from their families and slowed the ability of migrants to apply for asylum.”

Smith then brought on A.B. Stoddard, an editor for Real Clear Politics, for further discussion. During the discussion, Smith seemed to grow more and more sorrowful as the two discussed the haphazard nature of the process for seeking asylum at the southern border. That process has been degraded under the Trump administration, which is forcing people to stay in migrant camps in Mexico while they wait for their asylum claims to be heard. But the camps are so underserved that migrants are growing desperate and attempting dangerous border crossings.

Smith eventually went into a bit of a civics and history lesson:

“Through the history of this nation, we have said give us your tired, your poor and your huddled masses. That’s what we’ve said as a society to people who were in a position where they cannot or their children cannot properly survive. And we have always since the dawn of this nation said then come, we’ll figure this out.”

“When did we change that,” he concluded as he seemed to tear up. “How do we get that back?”

Stoddard had no answers. At this point, no one does.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.