Conservative commentator Scott Jennings endured some quick-witted pushback Thursday on CNN for arguing that “a bunch of people” could start to join Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and help round up immigrants — simply because actor Dean Cain announced he will.
“Having someone like that out touting it, talking about, ‘Hey, this is a thing you can do for your government, this is a public service,’ it’s going to help them recruit and they have a bunch of people to recruit,” Jennings said on “NewsNight With Abby Phillip.”
Cain, who played Superman in the 1990s ABC series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” told Fox News on Wednesday that he’s already a reserve police officer in Idaho. The former television star then announced that he’ll be “sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP.”
Jennings joined a burgeoning Republican chorus in touting the news as an invaluable recruitment tool. Guest panelist and podcaster Van Lathan couldn’t help but interrupt, however, and said: “Scott, it’s not ’95. Nobody gives a Sam Hill what Dean Cain does.”
“You may not,” replied Jennings, suggesting Cain remains an influential conservative.
Lathan went on to suggest some unspoken motivations for Cain joining ICE, which received an enormous funding infusion as a result of the GOP’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill — and has since announced a maximum signing bonus of $50,000 for Americans of all ages.
“Dean ain’t worked in a while,” Lathan told Jennings. “Dean needs the 50,000. That’s what got Dean off the couch. Dean ain’t worked in a while. Dean’s gonna take that money and buy some crypto [currency] with it. Dean needs the 50 [thousand dollars]. That’s what Dean is on.”
Lathan wasn’t the only suspicious panelist. Even Mediaite founder Dan Abrams — who said President Donald Trump’s administration “deserves an enormous amount of credit” for securing the U.S.-Mexico border — dismissed Cain’s role as a PR move.
“You know, look, it’s like he said: ‘I’m getting sworn in,’ right?” Abrams said Thursday. “When you talk about getting sworn in, he’s not really going to be an ICE agent. I mean, he’s going to go on some ICE raids, he’ll be an honorary member, et cetera.”
Jennings noted earlier in the discussion that there’s “a massive amount of recruitment” at ICE because the agency now has “a huge amount of money” to hire new agents. Abrams agreed, but said he hopes the quality of these recruits exceeds that of their current peers.
“I just hope that they have that reasonable suspicion that we’ve been talking about,” he said about ICE agents. “I hope they’re not just going in and grabbing a bunch of people because they happen to be waiting outside the Home Depot looking to earn a living that day.”