CNN host Abby Phillip was forced to mediate between two panelists Monday night on CNN NewsNight when one of her guests called the other a “racist.”
CNN analyst Ana Navarro was discussing how the Trump administration has caused a “reign of terror” among the Latino community in the U.S. with President Donald Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
Phillip’s other guest, Brad Polumbo, accused Navarro of being “hyperbolic” or exaggerating the impact of the ongoing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“It might be hyperbolic for you as a white man. It’s certainly not hyperbolic for me as a Latino,” Navarro said.
“Oh, OK, we’re being racist now,” Polumbo accused Navarro. She immediately denied it, and Phillip jumped in, agreeing with Navarro.
“That’s not being racist,” Phillip said.
“So dismiss my opinion for being a white person,” Polumbo charged.
Navarro said she wasn’t dismissing his opinion, that she was speaking for the Latino community.
Polumbo disagreed. “You don’t speak in one voice for them,” he claimed.
“OK, let me speak with my voice then. You said I was being hyperbolic, let me respond,” Navarro said.
“Until you insulted me racially, sure,” Polumbo shot back.
“Being a white man is an insult?” Navarro asked.
“When you invoke it as an argument,” Polumbo responded.
“Do you think Latinos may be living under certain circumstances other people may not be right now?” Navaro asked.
That’s when Phillip jumped in again, asking to pause the conversation.
“I just want to make a point that, Brad, all she’s saying is that her view of the situation is different from yours. I don’t think that’s an insult,” Phillip said.
“She basically said, I’m wrong because I’m a white man,” he answered.
Phillip disagreed. “No, no, no. She just said, ‘I see it differently.’ She said, she said ‘I see it differently from you,’ which is not an insult. It’s not. And it’s also not a racial insult.”
Polumbo later responded to an X user who posted part of the segment on social media with the caption, “Ana Navarro dismisses opinion of CNN panelist because he is a white man.”
“Well that was fun,” Polumbo seemingly joked.
“Girlfriend Brad Polumbo was big mad with Navarro reminding him of his being white. Pearls!” another X user posted.
And still another user posted: “She’s not dismissing his opinion for being white. She’s acknowledging that the Trump regime’s policies hurt people of color more than white people. Thus she is not being hyperbolic in the context of the harm being caused minority communities.”
Immigration agents have been detaining a growing number of U.S. citizens, many of them Latinos, in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal migrants. Axios is reporting critics are calling the detainments “racial profiling and overzealous policing.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson has denied the reports, calling them false.
But as ICE raids continue in mostly Latino communities, a review by Axios of news reports, social media videos, and other sources found several times when U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained.
And the current acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, told Fox News they don’t need probable cause to detain people, seemingly admitting that they are detaining U.S. citizens.
“They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody and briefly detain them and question them,” Lyons said. “They just need the totality of the circumstances,” he added.
Lyons even said in the interview that ICE agents can stop people based on their “location” and “physical appearance,” which is blatantly unconstitutional.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to round up and deport violent criminals who had come to the U.S. illegally as part of an unprecedented “invasion.” But government data is showing something completely different.
As of June 29, 57,861 people had been detained by ICE, according to a report by Fortune. Of those 41,495, or nearly 72 percent, had no criminal convictions.
“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” the senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, told Fortune.
Eisen says there’s simply “no research and evidence that supports his claims.”
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