When a longtime progressive like Bill de Blasio tells Sean Hannity that “defund the police” and Biden’s border policies “made no sense,” it signals how badly Washington’s experiments on crime and immigration have backfired on ordinary Americans.
Story Snapshot
- Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio now calls the “defund the police” movement a mistake and says it “made no sense.”
- De Blasio also says he does not like President Biden’s border policy and agrees Democrats “rightfully” deserve criticism for it.
- Sean Hannity uses the interview to argue that lax border enforcement helped create the migrant crisis straining New York City.
- Neither side offers hard numbers on crime or migration, highlighting how both parties talk past the public without full evidence.
De Blasio’s reversal on ‘defund the police’ and crime fears
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio once backed shifting money from the New York Police Department, but now says the “defund the police” push was a mistake that “made no sense.” In the Fox News podcast “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” he explains that it would have been smarter to ask, “How can we do better?” instead of cutting funding. He says police leaders told him cities needed more support for young people so streets could be safer for both residents and officers.
De Blasio also talks about crime and people leaving New York, tying those worries to how national policies are felt on the ground. He suggests that slogans and quick fixes never matched the real work needed to keep neighborhoods safe. But neither he nor Hannity offer clear crime statistics or migration data in the clips and write‑ups that have surfaced so far, leaving viewers to connect the dots without numbers. That gap feeds public suspicion that leaders talk in headlines, not hard facts.
Border policy, migrant crisis, and rare agreement with Hannity
On immigration, de Blasio tells Hannity he “doesn’t like what Biden did with the border” and says Democrats “rightfully” deserve criticism for how the administration handled the southern border surge. He describes Biden’s earlier stance as too relaxed and says he only grasped how severe the situation was after Biden later tightened enforcement in his final year. De Blasio calls their shared concern over the border “common ground,” an unusual moment between a progressive mayor and a conservative host.
Sean Hannity pushes the point further, arguing that Biden’s shift came too late and that lax enforcement helped fuel the migrant crisis that flooded New York City with asylum seekers. Hannity claims this is exactly what he had warned about for years, and that de Blasio’s new stance proves those warnings were correct. De Blasio does not fully embrace Hannity’s framing, but he does concede that something “changed” in the administration and that Democrats earned the backlash they received.
What both sides leave out: evidence, incentives, and public frustration
Both men lean on strong language but light documentation. De Blasio talks about crime and “mass migration” out of New York, while Hannity links border policy to the city’s migrant crisis, yet neither supplies detailed data in these public exchanges. Their claims could be tested with city crime reports, budget records, and migration figures, or with audits of how police funding changes tracked against crime trends. Those primary sources are not in the discussion so far, and that missing proof matters.
💥 NEW: Fox’s Hannity and Bill de Blasio CLASH over the trajectory of the left and Democrat Socialists: “You are destroying your party, so I’m OK with it!” pic.twitter.com/8RfEmGR2Io
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) July 2, 2026
The clash also fits a larger pattern: former Democratic officials increasingly show up on right‑leaning outlets to distance themselves from national party decisions on crime, immigration, and public order. For hosts like Hannity, these moments boost ratings and appear to validate long‑held critiques of “woke” policies and weak borders. For politicians like de Blasio, admitting past mistakes can be a way to protect their own reputations while blaming the federal government for failures felt in cities.
Why this exchange resonates beyond left versus right
For many Americans, the sharp part is not that a liberal mayor agrees with a conservative host, but that it took years of rising fear and frustration to get any admission of error at all. De Blasio had defended moving roughly $1 billion from the New York Police Department budget back in 2020 and said he was “comfortable” with that balance. Now he calls the broader “defund” concept a mistake, without clearly connecting that shift to specific changes in crime or safety.
This back‑and‑forth reflects why voters across the spectrum feel the system is broken. Leaders tried big experiments on policing and borders, media outlets framed them as culture‑war battles, and only later did some insiders admit the costs were too high. Yet even in that admission, there is little concrete evidence and almost no detailed plan for fixing the damage. That leaves ordinary people—whether worried about crime, migration, or government overreach—feeling like the elites are arguing on television while real problems at home remain unsolved.
Sources:
mediaite.com, youtube.com, foxnews.com
