South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday that migrants should “stay” in their countries of origin instead of undertaking the “dangerous” journey across the U.S. / Mexico border.
Graham’s comments on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum” came after several migrants, including three children, were discovered dead in South Texas near the Rio Grande river. Many of President Donald Trump’s critics, including Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, have blamed the deaths on the current administration’s immigration policies.
“This is not the president’s fault” Graham told Fox News host Martha MacCallum, calling the attempts to shift the blame to the president “disgusting.”
“People from Central America are being enticed to come here in record numbers,” Graham said. “We doubled the number of people who came this year versus last year at this stage of last year, and we are going to double that again. We are going to spend four-point something billion dollars to deal with the humanitarian crisis.”
The South Carolina senator pointed out that migrants “will keep coming” if laws aren’t changed. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: America’s Elites Want ‘Immigration Without Limit’)
I hate it very much that this father and daughter died but they should stay in their country. We should help them in their country. This journey they are taking is very dangerous. So to my democratic colleagues, if we don’t change our law, we are going to have millions of people overrunning our border, and what are you going to do about that?
“Here’s our law,” Graham continued. “If you get one foot in the United States, you claim asylum, you are entitled to a hearing. The hearing is like three years away. People don’t show up. If you bring a small child, we can only hold the child for 20 days. We don’t want to separate families, so we let the entire family unit go. Word is out that if you bring a small child to the United States and ask for asylum, you are never going to be sent back. You stay in America forever. Until we change that law, nothing changes.”
“And it leads to some of the tragedies that we are seeing,” MacCallum responded.
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