Comedian Bill Maher laid into Dr. Phil for embedding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on deportation raids across the nation, and the TV doctor roared right back.
“Why are you going on these ICE raids? I don’t understand that,” Maher asked the psychologist on Friday night’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO.
Maher continued, “You’re a guy who, for so many years, has been working to put families together, to bring families who are apart and heal them. And now you’re going on raids with people who are literally separating families. Explain that.”
Yet a visibly tense Phil, real name Philip McGraw, was having no part in entertaining Maher’s concerns. He robustly responded, “Now that’s bulls–t.”
McGraw questioned, “If you arrest somebody that’s a citizen that has committed a crime, or is DUI with the child in the backseat, do you think they don’t separate that family right then, right there?”
McGraw was spotted in June with U.S. Border Czar Tom Hoffman and a camera crew in tow leading up to deportation raids in Los Angeles, CNN reported. McGraw was also seen embedded with ICE agents in Chicago. The stunt was criticized as insensitive and choreographed for cameras, CNN reported.
McGraw went on to defend the personnel carrying out the raids and also threw his support behind keeping their identities a secret to protect them from retaliation.
“They’re doxxing them,” McGraw said. “They’re putting their names, their pictures, their addresses of their families on the internet. They’re putting them on telephone poles. So of course they’re wearing masks so they don’t get outed.”
Maher went on to suggest that Americans don’t want violent criminals in the country, but that these are not the people being targeted by ICE.
“A lot of Latinos in this city are hiding. If you can’t go to work, because you’re hiding, what other recourse is there for them, except crime?” Maher said. “I feel like this is going to turn out the opposite of what they wanted.”
Maher has been increasingly critical of the Trump administration in recent months. Last week he delivered a six-month scorecard on Trump, shredding many of the president’s top-line policies.
In the Friday show’s opening monologue, Maher railed at the ongoing ICE operations and the administration’s refusal to reconsider their mass deportation plan.
“I don’t get Trump, I really don’t,” Maher said. “ICE, going around there with their masks, throwing people into vans—not popular, and yet he’s doubling down on unpopular.”
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