The issue of resettling Palestinians across the United States has put former United Nations (UN) Ambassador Nikki Haley, running in the GOP presidential primary, on defense — clarifying her opposition to such plans in multiple statements.
At the start, on October 15, CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), also running in the GOP primary, suggesting that “all” Palestinians are antisemitic. Just before the comment, though not shown in Tapper’s on-air clip, DeSantis said the U.S. must not resettle any Palestinians as refugees.
Haley, in response to Tapper’s clip, defended some Palestinians, saying, “There are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule; they want to be free from all of that, and America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists, and that’s what we have to do.”
“You have to realize that whether we’re talking about Gazans and Palestinians, all of them don’t want — half of them at the time that I was [at the UN] — didn’t want to be under Hamas’s rule,” Haley said. “They didn’t want to have terrorists overseeing them. They knew that they were living a terrible life because of Hamas. You have the other half that supported Hamas.”
Haley’s campaign quickly clarified her remarks, telling RealClearPolitics the following day that she “opposes the U.S. taking in Gazans” and supports “Hamas-supporting countries like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey” absorbing Palestinians.
For days, DeSantis’s campaign has used Haley’s comments on CNN to label her a supporter of Palestinian refugee resettlement akin to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who has said Americans should “welcome” Palestinians to their communities.
“Why would you even have the discussion about vetting people and saying you can separate one from the other unless you were saying we would import them?” DeSantis told Megyn Kelly on the former Fox News host’s podcast on October 17:
Why would we be vetting people if they’re just going to go take up shop in Egypt? We’d have no role in that. I do think it shows an instinct on her behalf to one, try to cater to elite opinion. Because my view of no refugees from Gaza, that’s supported by probably a massive percentage of Americans, probably not that popular in elite circles. And I think she tries to cater to that. [Emphasis added]
But then the other thing is, I do think she’s still suffering under the illusions, which should have been wiped away after dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan, that somehow people in that part of the world just yearn to live in American-style Democracy and freedom. The average person in Gaza that’s been taught to hate Jews, what they seek is the destruction of the Jewish state. And that is not limited to Hamas. That is a widespread, deeply embedded belief amongst Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip.” [Emphasis added]
The following day, on October 18, the Haley campaign issued a press release promoting a report from the website “Check Your Fact” that declared:
The entire context [of the CNN interview] shows that Haley was not talking about accepting refugees from Gaza but responding to DeSantis’s claim that the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are anti-Semitic because they allegedly don’t believe in Israel’s right to exist. [Emphasis added]
Likewise, SFA, Inc. — the super PAC backing Haley’s presidential primary bid — released a similar press release in which the group touted the former South Carolina governor as being long opposed to refugee resettlement from terrorism-linked countries.
“What we are witnessing [in Israel] is pure evil, and the DeSantis team’s latest attempt to mislead voters about Haley is the ultimate sign of desperation after realizing that Haley is beating him in multiple polls,” the SFA, Inc. press release states.
Facts matter.
— Team Haley (@TeamHaley) October 18, 2023
“Never Back Down’s claim is false. Check Your Fact reviewed @NikkiHaley’s interview with CNN host Jake Tapper and the transcript and did not find any instances of Haley calling for the U.S. to take in refugees from Gaza.” https://t.co/nk05HL1uxS
As Breitbart News has detailed, though, Haley’s positions on immigration-related issues have changed over time.
Three days after Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris, France, on November 13, 2015, Haley remained one of just nine Republican governors who continued backing then-President Barak Obama’s plan to resettle Syrian refugees across the U.S. Later that day, Haley came out against Obama’s Syrian refugee resettlement operation.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
