Bill Maher Puts Dr. Phil on Blast for Going on ICE Raids
It hasn’t been a great summer for Dr. Phil. Merit Street Media, his multiplatform media company, filed for bankruptcy less than two years after its launch. (Don’t worry, he immediately started a new one.) And he just got called out by Bill Maher for his hypocrisy around ICE and immigration.
In a crass move even for reality TV, Dr. Phil and his TV crew have been tagging along on ICE raids, telling the masked lawmen that he wants to “tell your story and have your back.” To Maher, the ride-alongs appear to fly in the face of the public image Dr. Phil cultivated for decades when he was Oprah Winfrey’s daytime TV protege.
“Why are you going on these ICE raids? I don’t understand that,” Maher wondered on Friday’s episode of HBO’s Real Time. “You’re a guy who we know for so many years who has been working to put families together. To bring families who are apart and heal them. And now you’re going on raids with people who are literally separating families.”
Don't Miss
“That’s bullshit!” sputtered Dr. Phil.
How so, Maher asked? ICE is not separating families?
Well, yes. But, but, but that’s what police do. “Look, if you arrest somebody that’s a citizen, that has committed a crime or is DUI with a child in the backseat, do you think they don’t separate that family right then, right there?” Dr. Phil countered. “Of course they do.”
“But that’s not what they’re doing,” said Maher.
Rather than responding to Maher’s retort, Dr. Phil pivoted to an explanation of why ICE agents wear masks. The poor employees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are just doing their jobs, enforcing laws that legislators put on the books, and they’re getting doxxed for their trouble.
Sure, Maher agreed, doxxing is wrong. But how does that justify rounding up immigrants at a Home Depot looking for an honest day’s work?
ICE agents didn’t make the laws, Dr. Phil repeated. What does Maher expect them to do? “If you don’t like the law, change it,” he insisted. “I don’t like that law. At all.”
That dubious remark gave Maher the opening he needed. “If you don’t like it,” he asked, “why are you going?”
It’s hard to hear Dr. Phil’s response over the studio audience’s applause, forcing him to sputter for a moment while he waited for the clapping to subside. “I don’t like hunting,” Maher interjected while Dr. Phil paused. “I don’t go out with hunters.”
“What you said was eloquent, and it sounded great. But uh-uh,” said fellow guest Stephen A. Smith, tagging in and dropping from the top rope. While Dr. Phil insisted that ICE agents were focusing on predators with a dozen crimes on their rap sheets, Smith agreed with Maher that raids of churches, schools and workplaces to round up otherwise harmless people went beyond ICE’s publicly stated aim. (Dr. Phil insisted ICE wasn’t going into churches, despite pastors writing USA Today op-eds about ICE raiding their churches.)
At this point, the audience was applauding every argument against Dr. Phil, a tough night on TV for the once popular talk show host. The public embarrassment must make a day in bankruptcy court seem like a welcome distraction.
