Graham blasts Trump’s ‘sheer ignorance’ on immigration

GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey Graham bashed Donald Trump’s “sheer ignorance” on immigration as prominent Republicans are being forced to rebuke or defend the controversial remarks.

“It’s just out of sheer ignorance, the comments he made,” Graham said Thursday on CNN’s “New Day.”

“The 11 million, plus, illegal immigrants come here mostly for work, they come from poorer and poorer countries, the overwhelming, vast majority are good, decent, hard-working people.”

{mosads}Graham added that while “among the 11 million, there are some very bad people,” Trump has it “absolutely wrong” by trying to stereotype all illegal immigrants by the actions of few.

Trump’s comments came from his presidential announcement last month, where he lamented that Mexican immigrants were “rapists.” As Trump’s business partners have cut ties with him thanks to the comments, he’s dug in, causing the comments to continue to reverberate in the echo chamber.

Graham said that, while Trump “expresses frustration, frustration doesn’t cut it.”

He panned both the Republican Party and President Obama for failing to make immigration a priority and lauded his own efforts to address the issue. He helped sponsor the bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013, before it died in the House, a move Graham said showed his commitment to the issue even though it was to his “own political detriment at times.”

CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Graham to address personal criticism of his hawkish defense record by Trump in a Wednesday night CNN interview, where Trump accused him of wanting to “bomb everybody.”

“I don’t think it’s unpopular in the American public to stop radical Islam from coming back to our shores. The strategy we’ve deployed in Iraq and Syria is a miserable failure, ISIL is not being degraded and destroyed,” Graham said using an alternate acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The senator also praised his state’s decision this week to take down the Confederate flag from its Capitol grounds in the wake of last month’s killing of nine congregants at a historically black church. Graham initially supported the flag but changed his tune days after the attacks and said that the removal would help the state move forward.

“It gives us a new start, a fresh start, let’s take advantage of it,” he said.