While in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Hillary Clinton participated in a panel titled, “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values.”
During the panel, Clinton appeared to take a stronger approach to her previous stance on border security.
“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton said.
“It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people and how we’re going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization,” she added.
Clinton acknowledged that there are places where a physical barrier is appropriate but opposed large-scale expansion of a border wall during her 2016 presidential campaign.
At the time, she supported then President Barack Obama’s executive actions that deferred immigration enforcement against millions of children and parents in the country illegally and wanted to end the practice of family detention.
Clinton also planned on continuing Obama’s policy of deporting violent criminals, but wanted to scale back immigration raids, which she said at the time produced “unnecessary fear and disruption in communities,” Fox News Digital previously reported.
In 2018, Clinton called out the Trump administration for its deportation policies.
“It is now the official policy of the US government — a nation of immigrants — to separate children from their families. That is an absolute disgrace. #FamiliesBelongTogether,” she wrote on X.
At the Newmark Civic Life Series in Manhattan last year, Clinton argued that immigrants, whether legal or illegal, have made the American economy exceptional by adding to the workforce.
“One of the reasons why our economy did so much better than comparable advanced economies across the world is because we actually had a replenishment, because we had a lot of immigrants, legally and undocumented, who had a, you know, larger than normal — by American standards — families,” she said.
