Called Out

Tomi Lahren slammed immigrants on Fox News, so a genealogist looked up her family history

This weekend, Trump-supporting conservative bomb-thrower Tomi Lahren appeared on Fox News and gave what was one of her more ignorant rants against illegal immigration to date.

During her appearance on Fox’s Watters’ World, Lahren defended comments from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who recently made headlines after he said that immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally “don’t integrate well” and “don’t have skills.”

Speaking to Fox host Jesse Watters, Lahren declared that accepting people into the U.S. with “low skills and low education” and who don’t speak English is “not what this country is based on.”

“We don’t believe in importing poverty,” Lahren said. “Trust me, I live in California. We have enough poverty, we have enough issues — we don’t need anymore.”

Lahren’s worlds immediately went viral and sparked a backlash, part of which came from Jennifer Mendelsohn, who is the founder of resistancegenealogy.com, a project that focuses on the family trees of people who are anti-immigrant.

According to Mendelsohn’s findings, Lahren’s ancestors immigrated to this country also not knowing how to speak English.

“Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German,” Mendelsohn tweeted. “Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English. Her great-grandfather’s 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian.”

Mendelsohn also revealed that Lahren’s great-great grandfather forged his naturalization papers and was indicted by a grand jury as a result. She later noted that he was acquitted.

Others on Twitter chimed in to mock and condemn Lahren’s remarks:

In a later tweet, Mendelsohn explained her motivations.

“This is not about playing gotcha,” she tweeted. “But as long as people like Lahren continue to push a specious agenda that suggests today’s immigrants are somehow wholly different from previous ones, I’ll keep showing just how alike they really are.”

Featured image via screen grab/YouTube

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