Not even MSNBC viewers could fall for this.

Andrea Mitchell, a talking head whose grasp of facts is often not quite what news consumers should expect from their television hosts, took her own reputation down another notch on Tuesday with statements on last week’s immigration raids in Mississippi.

The word “inane” would be a charitable way of putting it.

The topic came up on “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” when Mitchell was questioning NBC correspondent Gabe Gutierrez about an interview he conducted with Matthew Albence, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

During the interview, a showboating Gutierrez insisted on playing a short video for Albence of a sobbing young girl mortified that her illegal alien father had been arrested.

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Albence said he’d already seen the video, but Gutierrez played it anyway — the better to make for dramatic television.

“What would you tell that little girl?” Gutierrez asked.

Albence fielded the question cleanly. While not losing a sympathetic demeanor, he patiently explained what — to most adults, anyway — were the obvious facts of the case:

The illegal alien had broken the law. ICE agents enforce the law. A situation like that means someone – like a weeping little girl – isn’t going to be happy.

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And the parents are the ones to blame for that.

“Every law enforcement agency enforces the law against individuals who have broken it,” Albence said. ”The parents or the individuals that are breaking the law are ultimately the ones that are responsible for placing their children in this situation.”

He explained that when police officers respond to a domestic disturbance call, they often make arrests of individuals while their children are present.

Mature people who in possession of their faculties generally understand that that’s the way the law works.

Other people, like, say, Andrea Mitchell, pretend to be astonished at even the possibility.

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Check out the video here, via the Media Resource Center:

It might be one of the most enduring mysteries of the whole “family separation” aspect of the immigration crisis: How liberals continue to misrepresent the responsibility illegal aliens have for the consequences their being illegal.

Drug dealers, bank robbers, embezzlers, murderers and rapists get locked up all the time. If they happen to have children, that means they’re going to be separated from them. No one blinks an eye then, but if it’s illegal aliens, to people like Mitchell, it’s incomprehensible.

“Gabe, I was watching that,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know how you kept your cool, because the parents are to be blamed for breaking the law?”

Well, yes. They are to be blamed — for breaking the law.

Mitchell brought up several potential objections — the timing of the raid in relation to the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting; the fact that those who employed the illegals who were rounded up apparently didn’t face any of the same consequences. But they literally had nothing to do with what she was so outraged about.

There may be – and probably are – countless good reasons why men and women with self-respect, a drive for improvement and a true love of their children would decide to make new lives in the United States instead of some corruption-ridden hellhole south of the border, even if that means doing it without the blessing of the American government.

But subjective judgments aside, the fact of the matter is that millions of people live in this country illegally. It is the job of law enforcement agents – like those working for ICE – to enforce the law.

When those factors come into conflict – parental law breakers vs. law enforcement officers – it is the lawbreakers who are to blame for what ensues. Humans have understood that since before the time of Hammurabi.

And they understand it now.

Andrea Mitchell might be drawing a healthy paycheck to pretend otherwise, but even MSNBC viewers have to be able to figure that out.

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