Ivanka Trump is parting ways with her dad, President Donald Trump, when it comes to Syrian refugees.
In an interview with NBC News that aired Wednesday, Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser, said that the idea of opening U.S. borders to accept refugees from the civil war-torn country needs to be “part of the discussion.”
“I think there is a global humanitarian crisis that’s happening, and we have to come together, and we have to solve it,” she said.
And when NBC’s Hallie Jackson asked Ivanka Trump if solving the humanitarian crisis includes opening the borders to Syrians, she said: “That has to be part of the discussion. But that's not going to be enough in and of itself.”
President Trump, though, has taken an entirely different approach to the issue. In fact, he has already tried twice to temporarily freeze immigration into the U.S. from a handful of Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, and halt the refugee program. Both executive orders have been shot down by federal judges.
Rather than bringing Syrian refugees into the U.S., the president has repeatedly called for safe zones to be established in Syria.
Ivanka Trump also praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been at odds with Trump when it comes to accepting refugees.
“I think she sees me as a woman who’s aligned with her on many issues, and I think she has a great relationship with my father,” Ivanka Trump told Jackson.
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump criticized former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s immigration proposals by comparing her to Merkel.
“Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel, and you know what a disaster this massive immigration has been to Germany and the people of Germany — crime has risen to levels that no one thought would they would ever see,” he said last summer. “We have enough problems in our country. We don’t need another one.”
Ivanka Trump’s comments about Syrian refugees comes just weeks after President Trump launched 59 tomahawk missiles at an airbase operated by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which the White House believes is responsible for a recent chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of Syrians, including at least 28 children.
“Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children,” Trump said earlier this month. “It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.”
The president’s decision to hit the Assad regime marked a change of position from 2013, when he criticized then-President Barack Obama for seeking congressional authorization for airstrikes against the Syrian government in response to a 2013 gas attack.
