WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton conceded that loose immigration policies in the US and other Western countries “went too far,” while calling for the issue to be “fixed in a humane way.”

Speaking on a panel at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Clinton argued that her husband and former President Barack Obama demonstrated a way of enforcing border security policies while still being humane. 

“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton said during the “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values” panel. 

“It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people, and how we’re going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization,” the former secretary of state went on.

Clinton has long been a critic of President Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies, having railed against his proposal to construct a wall along the US-Mexico border during the 2016 campaign. 

She also backed Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave the children of illegal immigrants who were brought into the US at a very young age the ability to remain in the country. 

At the same time, she periodically contended that Europe, in particular, had been too lax on migration, acknowledging the political repercussions and backlash that ensued on the continent in response. 

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said in 2018.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Privately, she reportedly pressed the Biden administration to step up its game on immigration in response to the migrant crisis that roiled New York City in 2023. 

“More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump’s second term,” Clinton said. 

During the Clinton administration, over 12 million were deported, and during the Obama administration, 5 million were deported across their two terms. Thus far into Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security has claimed around 3 million have been deported, including 2.2 million “self-deportations.”

Critically, encounters at the US-Mexico border are at the lowest level in more than five decades, lower than the Clinton, Obama, and first Trump administration, according to data from Customs and Border Protection.