Fox News host Steve Doocy and contributor Michelle Malkin invented new border conspiracy theories to attack comprehensive immigration reform proposals after Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) visited the Southwest border fence.

McCain -- who was in Nogales, Arizona, at the Southwest border with four members of the “Gang of 8” on a border tour -- tweeted, “Just witnessed a woman successfully climb an 18-ft bollard fence a few yards from us.” On Fox & Friends, Doocy claimed that he believed the event was staged so that the administration could blame lax border security on sequestration. Co-host Gretchen Carlson pushed back on the conspiracy, claiming that this sort of event “happens frequently”:

DOOCY: I think there's a possibility that this could've almost been a PR stunt. I mean, let's face it, you've got these U.S. senators there who are working on immigration reform, you've got all those cameras down there, and you've got the sequester going on, where they're going, we're going to have to cut  back.

[...]

The Secretary of Homeland Security can say, look, you know, I'm having to cut back all my hours. Look at that lady, she just scaled an 18-foot bollard fence, and you all got it on camera.

CARLSON: Well, unfortunately, I think it happens frequently, and so maybe it was just by chance.

Malkin later appeared on the program to respond to McCain's tweet, noting that it prompted her editor to ask, “Did John McCain give her a boost up?” due to his support for comprehensive immigration reform:

MALKIN: There were a lot of aggravated and bemused observers of John McCain. The question came up and one of my editors put it this way, “Did John McCain give her a boost up?” Because of course he is now leading the charge for  exactly the kind of - I don't care what you call it - regularization, comprehensive immigration reform. It walks, it talks, and it squawks like another massive illegal alien amnesty and all it's going to result in is more of the kind of activity that they tweeted yesterday about at the border. More illegal immigration.

In that segment, Doocy again fearmongered over the effects that sequestration will have on border security. He claimed that due to sequestration, the border will be “open for business” for two hours per shift. However, cutting border patrol hours down from 10 hours a day to 8 hour and requiring furloughs for workers will not put the nation's safety at risk. As Bloomberg reported:

The cuts probably won't dramatically increase crime or significantly compromise border security, said Chris Wilson, an associate with the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute, a Washington-based research group. The number of Border Patrol agents has doubled in the last decade, and illegal activity along the border between the ports of entry has fallen.

Border Patrol is “bigger than they've ever been and crossings are lower than they've ever been,” Wilson said in a telephone interview. The proposed cuts “would not put us at staffing levels unlike what we had in recent years and, therefore, would not put us at a point that we would have major security concerns as a result.”

Even in this instance, as Fox did point out, the woman was apprehended by Border Patrol agents, according to McCain. And despite pushing the idea that dangerous non-American criminals are crossing the border, a new story by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that U.S. citizens are more likely to be apprehended for smuggling drugs across the border as “4 out of 5 [drug] busts -- which may include multiple people -- involve a U.S. citizen.”