CNN’s Scott Jennings delivered a masterclass in dismantling the left’s talking points on illegal immigration. On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s NewsNight, Jennings made mincemeat of guest Tiffany Cross’s hyperbolic claims about ICE while cutting through the noise to expose the real scandal in the Abrego Garcia case.
Cross, co-host of some podcast you’ve never heard of and frankly aren’t going to listen to anyway, kicked things off with some wild rhetoric, claiming ICE is “a government agency run amok, that disappears people and does things illegally.”
You’ve heard this talking point before; countless other leftist commentators and Democrats in Congress have been using the same one.
Anyway, Jennings wasted no time calling out the absurdity. “Well, obviously they don’t ‘disappear’ people,” he fired back. “This is the most undeportable illegal alien in the history of illegal aliens.”
Then came the demolition. Turning to CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, Jennings asked point-blank, “Elie, is he in the country illegally?”
Honig had no choice but to confirm it: “Yes, he is.”
“Okay, number one,” Jennings noted. “Number two, does he have an existing deportation order?”
Honig tried to hedge. “Well, he did not. They got caught without one. They tried to —”
“He got one,” Jennings finished for him. “They said he couldn’t go to El Salvador. So, let’s admit a few things.”
For our VIPs: Debunking the Left’s Favorite Illegal Immigration Talking Point
Honig clarified that there’s “a withholding order preventing him from that,” referring to El Salvador. Jennings acknowledged the mistake. “Let’s admit a few. They shouldn’t have sent him to El Salvador. But — they shouldn’t have sent him to El Salvador. Okay. I admitted this.”
“They should not have sent him to El Salvador,” Honig agreed.
Here’s where Jennings delivered the knockout punch. “This case, I don’t care about,” he said, brushing aside the procedural missteps that had dominated the conversation. “All I really care about, this guy’s been living illegally in the United States for 13, 14, 15 years, and take everything else out of it. How is it that our government, our bureaucracy, our justice system, our sovereign nation cannot get rid of a single deportable illegal alien for 15 years? It’s crazy.”
As the CNN panel spiraled over the treatment of MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar García, Scott Jennings cut through the noise with the ONLY question that actually matters.
When Tiffany Cross called ICE a government agency “run amuck that disappears people,” @ScottJenningsKY had heard… pic.twitter.com/16hUCn9CNi
— Overton (@overton_news) December 31, 2025
And there it is. Jennings cut through all the hand-wringing about bureaucratic errors and got to the heart of the matter. The real story isn’t whether ICE crossed a procedural t or dotted an administrative i. The real story is that America’s immigration enforcement system is so broken and our justice system has become so partisan, that we can’t even deport one person whom everyone agrees is in the country illegally. For 15 years, this guy bounced around the system while lawyers argued over paperwork and activists shouted about human rights. All the while, he is a suspected MS-13 gang member, with the tats to match, a suspected human smuggler, and an accused domestic abuser. This guy is the poster child for what should be an easy deportation. But he became a cause célèbre of the left, and now he’s becoming a viral TikTok sensation for lip syncing to Spanish Christian music.
Jennings forced everyone at that table to confront an uncomfortable truth: When it takes a decade and a half to deport someone who has no legal right to be here, something is profoundly wrong with the system.
Jennings deserves credit for saying what millions of Americans are thinking, while the chattering class ties itself in knots over process complaints and paperwork errors.
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