Convicted felon and GOP congressional candidate Michael Grimm was asked Tuesday to comment about a heart-wrenching audio recording of young immigrant children sobbing and screaming for their parents, and suggested it was not dissimilar from a preschool.

Grimm — who doesn’t have children of his own, though does enjoy partying with underage girls — made the comments in response to a question by local television station NY1 during a campaign stop on Staten Island.

“You know, I can take you to any nursery and you’re going to hear the exact same things as a mother has to leave for work and has to leave her child at daycare,” he said. “You’re going to hear those exact same things, OK?”

Grimm is the latest Republican to defend the Trump administration’s abusive policy of violently separating immigrant children and infants from their families at the border, sometimes without telling them — effectively government-sanctioned child abduction. On Monday, white supremacist Laura Ingraham made a similar claim about the cages where many of the children are being held, likening the experience to summer camp.

Grimm went even further Tuesday, suggesting that the children and their families ought to be grateful for being caged like animals.


“I think when you really look at it, those children haven’t been that safe in a long time and the condition they have are much better from where they came from,” he said.

Rather than seizing the opportunity to lock up the “Human beings with a shred of empathy” vote, Grimm’s GOP primary opponent — Rep. Dan Donovan, who won a special election to fill Grimm’s vacated seat — echoed the sentiment, parroting the White House’s blatantly false talking points.

“They are horrible images, but the United States has taken good care of those children. So many of those — 10,000 of those children — are sent across the border unaccompanied. We’ve taken care of those children,” Donovan said.

“Right now, the Trump administration is obeying the law,” he insisted. “The Trump administration’s interpretation of the law is that what they are required to do.”

That is a lie. President Trump is under no legal obligation to kidnap children from their homes and confine them to metal cages. Despite what many Republicans and administration officials have claimed, there is no law in place that requires them to separate families at the border or prosecute asylum seekers, many of whom have been illegally turned away at the border ports of entry.


Grimm’s remarks are particularly galling given his 2014 felony conviction for, among other things, knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants at a restaurant he oversaw until 2010. He also pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion and lying under oath, and spent seven months in federal prison.