NY governor hits Trump on tweets: ‘This is not the time to foment hate’

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Wednesday dismissed President Trump’s tweets blaming Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) for an immigration policy that he said allowed the suspect in a deadly terrorist attack to enter the U.S.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Cuomo said that it is not appropriate to politicize the matter and warned that the president’s rhetoric would only fuel divisions at a time when the country should be unified.

“I don’t think this is the time to get political,” Cuomo said. “We had a policy — an immigration policy — in place in the ’90s. It was a bipartisan policy. It was signed by a Republican president.”

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“There’s not doubt that we have to be smarter and have more intelligence. But there’s also no doubt that this is not the time to play politics. This is not the time to foment hate. This is not the time to divide, because they all exacerbate the situation, right?”

Trump unleashed a series of tweets earlier Wednesday morning, pointing to a State Department program called the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which offers a set number of visas each year to immigrants from countries with lower admissions to the U.S. who meet certain qualifications.

The legislation behind the program was introduced in part by Schumer in 1990 while he was a member of the House, and passed in both chambers of Congress before being signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush.

In his tweets on Wednesday, Trump railed against the “lottery system” and called for “Merit Based immigration.” 

The president raised the program after a man drove a rented truck on a crowded bike path in Manhattan on Tuesday, killing eight people and injuring 11 others. The suspect in the attack, Sayfullo Saipov, entered the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010 under the Diversity Visa Lottery Program.