CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta accused the White House of "dog whistling" racism after he sparred with White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller at Wednesday's press briefing. Acosta also accused President Donald Trump of having a bias against Latino immigrants.
Acosta spoke with host Brooke Baldwin after the briefing ended, and went on a long rant after Miller revealed the White House's new immigration policy.
"I think this goes back to a problem that this White House has," Acosta said. "Remember when the president launched his campaign for president, he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. And that bias against Latino immigrants has just sort of infected the president, some of his top officials who deal with this issue of immigration throughout that entire time period, and I think you saw some of that spill out in the briefing room today."
Acosta claimed that Trump was dog whistling racism to Americans when he mentioned that a large part of the new immigration policy would include a preference for those who speak English. In his argument with Miller, Acosta had brought up the poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Acosta said that Trump was putting forth a "very powerful message" by blaming immigrants for taking people's jobs away.
"Does the president come out and say that emphatically and does he say it overtly? No, but when you hear the president make some of the comments that he makes about immigrants during the course of the campaign, talking about deportation forces and when you see Stephen Miller, a policy adviser to the president, talking about an English language preference for people coming into this country, it is a wink, it is a dog whistle to certain parts of this country that they are going to be looking at the racial and ethnic flow of immigrants coming into this country," Acosta said.
"I just think that's undeniable so I just wanted to remind him, this is what the Statue of Liberty says."