White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran into a buzzsaw Sunday morning when Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace challenged the Trump administration’s repeated false claims about terrorism and the southwestern border of the United States.

On this week’s edition of Fox News Sunday, Sanders told Wallace that President Trump meant what he said when he declared that he would keep the government shut down for “years” if necessary, in order to secure funding for his border wall.

But then, Wallace attacked a central theme of Trump’s push for a wall, the lie that tons of terrorists are streaming over the border with Mexico. He played a clip of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen claiming, at this week’s Rose Garden press conference, that “CBP has stopped over 3,000 what we call special interest aliens trying to come into the country on the southern border. Those are aliens who the Intel community has identified are of concern.”

“But special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they’re not terrorists themselves,” Wallace said, and added that “the state department says, quote, ‘there were no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico,'” citing a report that was released in September.

“We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is southern border,” Sanders began, but Wallace cut her off.

“I know the statistic, I didn’t know if you were going to use it, but I studied up on this,” Wallace said. “Do you know what those 4,000 people come where they are captured? Airports.”

“Not always…” Sanders said weakly.

“Airports. The state department says there hasn’t been any terrorists found coming across the southern border,” Wallace said.

“It’s by air it’s by land it’s by sea, it’s all of the above,” Sanders said, “but one thing that you’re forgetting is at the most vulnerable point of entry that we have into this country is our southern border. You have to protect it, and the more and more that individuals know that…”

“But they’re not coming across the southern border, Sarah, they’re coming and they’re being stopped at airports,” Wallace interrupted, once again.

“They’re coming a number of ways, they’re certainly, I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming through airports,” a flustered Sanders replied. “I’m saying that they come by air by land and by sea, and the more and more that our border becomes vulnerable and the less and less that we spend time and money protecting it the more that we’re going to have an influx, not just of terrorists, but of human traffickers and drug inflow.”

The Trump administration’s terrorism claims have been widely debunked, including in these pages. While that won’t stop them from continuing to tell these lies, journalists like Wallace might give them second thoughts.

Watch the clip above, via Fox.

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