Things got heated in a CNN debate between Republican commentator Ana Navarro and Donald Trump backer Jeffrey Lord this week when the former Reagan adviser questioned Navarro's Latino identity.

"There are no Latinos in this country, there are no African-Americans," Lord suggested on CNN's "At This Hour," according to Raw Story. "We are all Americans."

Lord, who in a January Conservative Review piece praised Trump as a conservative with solid electoral appeal and continues to support the TV personality despite his controversial comments about Mexican immigrants, alleged the Republican Party has a tendency to "patronize" Latinos, particularly those who "came here legally, who did the right thing (and) are being insulted here."

But Navarro insisted the problem was not with the GOP but with the rhetoric of the real-estate mogul-turned-presidential candidate.

"Thank you for telling me what should be insulting," she told Lord.

"But see, I'm one of those Latinos that came here with a visa on a plane, that went through a process. And no, I don't think the Republican Party is being paternalistic. I don't find Marco Rubio, I don't find Jeb Bush paternalistic. So thank you for lecturing me on what I should be feeling about the Republican Party as a Latino."

Lord, meanwhile, suggested the University of Miami graduate was not Latino at all, according to Talking Points Memo.

"I don't think you're a Latino," he told Navarro. "I think you're an American just like me."

But the former national chair of then-GOP nominee John McCain's Hispanic Advisory Council noted she was "an American who was born in Nicaragua and was naturalized under Ronald Reagan's amnesty."

All the fuss was apparently due to Navarro's initial challenge, in which she had suggested that Trump was not a "legitimate candidate."

Trump's supporter, who in his magazine piece had called the "Apprentice" star "blunt-speaking" and "results-oriented," meanwhile, insisted the candidate's disparaging comments only applied to undocumented migrants -- and not those individuals who, like Navarro, are in the United States legally.

Watch the heated exchange below, via Media Matters: