‘What we have on the southern borders now is a grotesque, new low…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Best known for playing the chief navigation officer aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, “Star Trek” actor George Takei was all over the map Monday during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” displaying his less-than-stellar understanding of the issues surrounding real-life aliens.
Takei’s iconic turn as Mr. Sulu lasted only a handful of seasons before the sci-fi show was canceled 50 years ago, but after a half-century of milking the role, the actor recently has enjoyed a resurgence on Twitter for his far-left political commentary.
Surprisingly, Takei had harsh words for the policies of Democrats past and present who were responsible both for the World War II-era Japanese internment camps in the U.S., and the current overcrowding of detention centers in the ongoing illegal immigration crisis.
Spinning off the outlandish rhetoric of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, and other far-left Democrats, Takei referred to the detainment of Japanese–Americans during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration as American “concentration camps.”
In the current border crisis, Ocasio–Cortez has drawn criticism for implying that the conditions in detention facilities are comparable to the Nazi death centers—where brutal treatment, cruel scientific experiments, starvation and rampant disease were as apt to kill the imprisoned Jews and other victims as were the notorious gas chambers.
Takei—who, at the age of 5, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was himself taken to one of the U.S. internment camps with his family—admitted in the interview that he generally had fond memories of it.
After being on the set of a new series that dramatized the experience of those within the camps, Takei said he felt a certain sentimentality.
“It was, to me, a kind of nostalgic return because of my childhood experience,” he said. “But as a teenager, I learned a lot more about the reality—the harrowing experience that it was for my parents.”
Takei dialed up the rhetoric even farther by saying that the current detention of illegal immigrants at the Mexican border was worse than the wartime measures taken during the 1940s.
He repeated several statements about the detention centers that are widely disputed by U.S. immigration authorities, including unsourced claims about the conditions and a long-expired leftist talking point about the short-lived child-separation policy.
“What we have on the southern borders now is a grotesque, new low,” Takei said. “Children being torn away from their parents. Infants torn away, put in filthy, disgusting cages with human waste… And to really underscore the evil in this, some of them are scattered to the far reaches of the United States from the southern border… intentional cruelty.”
The overcrowding of the centers, lack of resources and the need to move some of the illegal immigrants farther inland are, of course, the direct result of Congressional Democrats’ refusal to cooperate in addressing the issue.
The Left long denied any sort of crisis, and only came around to acknowledging it after the centers already had reached critical mass.
Ocasio–Cortez, despite claiming Holocaust-like conditions in the facilities, has refused even to vote for emergency funding to alleviate the immigrants’ situation.
Yet, left-wing activists continue to encourage migrants from Central-American, African and Middle-Eastern countries to cross the border illegally and then claim asylum to avert deportation proceedings.
For those able to game the system, “sanctuary states” like New York and California have promised incentives such as free (taxpayer-subsidized) healthcare and college tuition.
Activist liberal judges, meanwhile, have sought to block many of the Trump administration’s efforts to address the border crisis through executive action, such as a policy requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico during the legal process.
Ignoring the Left’s culpability, Takei also invoked the brief 2018 child-separation policy, implemented by the Trump administration as a solution to longstanding “catch-and-release” loopholes that allow “families” of illegals to be let go after no more than 20 days of detention.
The result is believed to have been an uptick in child-trafficking and kidnapping as childless adults attempting to gain access to the U.S. falsely claim to be the underage victims’ parents.
Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which the White House said predated the current administration, lasted roughly a week in June of last year before a judge ordered the families reunited.
Last month, a government-commissioned study found that 95 percent of the 1619 separated children had been reunited with their guardians, and an additional 4 percent had been released after aging out of the system or choosing to return home to their native country.
But it seemed Takei didn’t get the memo.
“When the courts ordered them to bring the children and the parents together, they are so incompetent that they can’t find the right child or the parents to put them together,” he ranted to Meyers. “… It is an American tragedy and an American disgrace.”