El-Sayed spars with Jesse Watters on Fox News on immigration, Iran war: ‘Let me just answer the question’

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) on Monday clashed with Fox News host Jesse Watters on a slew of topics, including immigration enforcement and the Iran war, along with culture war topics , prompting the host twice to let him “just answer the question.”

The interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime” kicked off with a discussion on immigration and the duties carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Watters pressed El-Sayed on calling for ICE to be abolished, but the candidate stressed the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s (INS) handling of federal immigration cases before it was replaced by ICE in 2003.

“We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” El-Sayed said.

Watters dismissed this, saying INS “did the same thing as ICE back then” before cross talk erupted, with the host asking how many migrants without legal status were in the U.S.

“I mean, to your point –– Jesse, Jesse, let me just answer the question,” El-Sayed said. “To your point, we had far fewer under INS. … If you want to do that correlation, we have ICE now and we have far, far more undocumented people. So ICE is clearly not working.”

El-Sayed said Michigan voters “are asking me about how they’re going to afford their gas and groceries” and not about immigration. The exchange continued, with Watters accusing the candidate of dodging the question.

Watters later focused on Iran and started off by asking El-Sayed if he was “glad the ayatollah is dead,” referring to the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S. and Israel’s initial strikes on Iran that started the conflict in February. El-Sayed said he would “never defend the Iranian regime” but denounced the conflict with Iran.

“I understand selective memory about history, but we had a JCPOA that was well negotiated, that actually had nuclear nonproliferation far more securely than we have right now after having gone to war for the better part of six months,” he continued, referring to the Obama-era deal with Iran that President Trump walked away from in 2018.

“Yeah, I like the fact that the nuclear program is buried under a mountain of rubble,” Watters countered.

“You understand that, like, nuclear material doesn’t just go away because you buried it under a mountain of rubble?” El-Sayed asked back. “You understand they can still go back and bury it out, right?”

Watters said the U.S. was “watching it from Space Force” and that if anyone digs up any nuclear material it will go “kaboom.”

El-Sayed later set to differentiate himself from his opponent, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who has not been on Watters’s show. The candidate said Rogers was “ducking” from a debate with him and said he was doing the same with Watters’s show.

“Can we all agree that Mike Rogers is a beta?” El-Sayed said, prompting the first of several times where he made the remark and Watters laughed, using the online term to describe weak or unsuccessful men. “Can we all agree with that? He won’t even come on your show. He’s afraid of getting grilled.”

El-Sayed later said Rogers “thinks he’s running against Hasan Piker,” the popular left-wing Twitch streamer who has raised money and campaigned for El-Sayed. He suggested appearing on the show was doing Watters “a favor.”

The two debated several other topics, including transgender athletes, gender-affirming care for children, reparations for the descendants of freed slaves and the NFL. Watters wrapped up the interview saying they would “do it again, Abdul.”