In a break with her father President Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump said in a new interview that opening U.S. borders to Syrian refugees should be “part of the discussion.”
“I think there is a global humanitarian crisis that’s happening, and we have to come together, and we have to solve it,” the First Daughter and Assistant to the President told NBC News in an interview that aired Wednesday. When asked if that included opening the United States to Syrian refugees, Ivanka Trump responded: “That has to be part of the discussion, but thats not going to be enough in and of itself.”
Trump has already moved twice while in office to restrict the flow of refugees — including those from Syria — into the U.S., along with travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. Those executive orders have both been blocked by federal courts.
The President has repeatedly called for Syrians fleeing the country’s civil war to be placed in safe zones rather than the United States, and said during the Presidential campaign that he would send Syrian refugees back if he was elected, often criticizing Hillary Clinton for proposing to expand the number of refugees allotted into the U.S.
“Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel, and you know what a disaster this massive immigration has been to Germany and the people of Germany — crime has risen to levels that no one thought would they would ever see,” Trump said in August, referring to the German Chancellor. “We have enough problems in our country, we don’t need another one.”
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The First Daughter was speaking with NBC News from Germany, a country that has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. While in Berlin, Trump sat on a panel discussing female entrepreneurship at the Women’s 20 summit — at the invitation of Merkel — where she was booed by the audience after defending her father as an advocate for women. She also visited the Holocaust memorial and the Siemens Technik Akademie.
In a sense, Ivanka Trump’s break from her father on this issue reflects what she told CBS News recently: “Where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor.”
