I saw the dumb defender say he was conflating immigrant and migrant but I replayed that part a dozen times. It really, really sounds like an ‘N’ as the first letter. It definitely was not him beginning to pronounce ‘immgr’. You can plainly hear it.
But even if we gave him the benefit of the doubt, the fact that Megyn Kelly completely ignored it and the fact that he didn’t apologize immediately and explain it says volumes about both of them. Why didn’t Kelly even say anything? Maybe she’s so used to hearing it in her circles, maybe even saying it, that it didn’t even register as something unusual to her and she didn’t notice it.