Hillary Clinton gave her first national interview as a 2016 presidential candidate on Tuesday, in which the former secretary of state railed against Donald Trump for his recent comments on illegal aliens. But it wasn't that long ago when Clinton herself admitted that she was "adamantly" against illegal immigrants.
Clinton told CNN on Tuesday that she is "very disappointed" in Trump for saying during his presidential campaign announcement that some Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists.
However, in February 2003, Clinton said on the John Grambling radio show that she is "adamantly" against illegal aliens.
"I am adamantly against illegal immigrants," then-Sen. Clinton said. "Certainly we've got to do more at our borders and people have to stop employing illegal immigrants."
The Republican National Committee unearthed and released the interview in May.
"Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties," Clinton continued. "Stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to get yard work, and construction work, and domestic work."
Fast forward to 2015, as Clinton leads the Democratic field and seeks to secure the Latino vote, calling for a path to citizenship for all immigrants and pledging to not only move forward with President Obama's executive amnesty program, but to "do everything possible under the law to go even further."
"I will fight to stop the partisan attacks on the president's executive actions," she said, according to The Washington Examiner.
"I am absolutely convinced that this is in our economic interest, it's in the interest of our values and it's even in the interest of our long term security as a nation," she said, Breitbart reported.
Clinton went on to tell CNN that she is disappointed with the entire Republican Party for not responding to Trump's comments.
"I'm very disappointed in those comments and I feel very bad and very disappointed with him and with the Republican Party for not responding immediately and saying, 'Enough, stop it,'" Clinton said.
"But you know [the Republican Party] are all in the same general area on immigration," she added. "They don't want to provide a path to citizenship. They range across a spectrum of being either grudgingly welcome or hostile towards immigrants, and I'm going to talk about comprehensive immigration reform. I'm going to talk about all of the good, law-abiding, productive members of the immigrant community that I personally know, that I've met over the course of my life, that I would like to see have a path to citizenship."
But again, in 2006, Clinton appeared to be in line with the Republican Party's stance on immigration, telling the New York Daily that while she favored a path to citizenship, she also wanted to build a fence along some of the southern border to keep illegal immigrants out.
"A country that cannot control its borders is failing at one of its fundamental obligations," Clinton said.
"There is technology that would be in the fence that could spot people coming from 250 or 300 yards away and signal patrol agents who could respond," she said, suggesting that the fence could be modeled after the ones that Israel uses to separate itself from the Palestinians.
After Clinton criticized Trump for comments that she once appeared to align with, the billionaire real estate mogul shot back on Wednesday.
"Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States. On top of that, she is extremely bad on illegal immigration," Trump said in a statement sent to Business Insider. "Despite anything you may hear to the contrary, I do not think she is electable."
