Geraldo: Every Time You Say 'Illegals' It's Like Fingernails on a Blackboard!

Geraldo Rivera hates it whenever any one around him refers to people illegally crossing the border as “illegals.” On Monday’s edition of Outnumbered he challenged FNC’s Ainsley Earhardt when she dared to use that phrase in his presence. Rivera barked: “Every time you say ‘illegals,’ it’s like fingernails on a black board!”

Well Earhardt, along with a few of her co-panelists, fought back against Rivera’s insistence that the border-crossers were “law-abiding.”

The following is the relevant exchange as it was aired on the July 28 edition of FNC’s Outnumbered:

ANDREA TANTAROS: Ainsley how does this move, if the president does this without Congress’s authority, how does this help the immigration crisis at the border? How does this help the problem?

AINSLEY EARHARDT: I’ll tell you how we can help the immigration problem at the border. We need to, the President needs to sit down with all the governors of the border states and come up with a plan to secure our border. The President needs to tell all the Central American companies or countries that we are not doing business with them any longer unless they fix this problem and they need to come and pay to send their illegal immigrants that are here in our country illegally to take them back home and make sure they’re secure and they’re safe. It is not our responsibility.

Now granted I’m all for children, of course, we all are. And many of these are not children. It’s been proven recently. But I think that so many people in America did it the right way. They came across the border the right way. They need - these illegals need to do it the right way. Because my mother is a school teacher and she’s preached to stand on your own two feet. Autonomy is so important. And we need to teach these illegals that when they come to our country, do it the right way.

GERALDO RIVERA: Every time you say “illegals,” it’s like fingernails on a black board!

EARHARDT: They’re not legal! They’re not legal! You like illegal aliens better?

[crosstalk]

RIVERA: Legal or illegal is an adjudication. It is a finding. It’s not, it’s not an adjective to describe a person.

TANTAROS: But is the act of breaking the law, legal?

RIVERA: Without documentation. Why illegal aliens? We, we, we create, we create this monstrous image of these essentially law abiding, hard working people-

EARHARDT: They’re not law abiding.

RIVERA: The only law they’ve ever broken is to come across without any documentation.

JEDEDIAH BILA: That’s not law abiding.

EARHARDT: That’s illegal!

BILA: That’s illegal!  

RIVERA: But they commit fewer crimes than, than citizens do.