The Biden administration’s failure to recognize the crisis at the southern border harms Americans and migrants, Republican representatives said Wednesday.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus said the situation at the border is a humanitarian, health and national security crisis that President Joe Biden has refused to acknowledge during a press conference Wednesday. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would not refer to the situation as a crisis during a congressional hearing Wednesday, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
“This administration knew it was coming … they knew this surge was coming because of their lousy policies,” Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs said. He called the increase in migrants at the southern border “Biden’s inhumane border crisis” and said the Biden administration is more focused on undoing former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies than acknowledging the situation at the border.
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Texas Rep. Michael Cloud accused the Biden administration of partnering with cartels rather than communities in the U.S. and across the border. The Biden administration’s policies encourage cartel activity, including smuggling migrants across the border for thousands of dollars per person which migrants are commonly abused, Cloud said.
“The moment this president was elected the cartels knew, ‘oh it’s open season again let’s start recruiting, let’s start sending people to the border,'” Cloud said. “Here’s the tactic the cartels use: they overwhelm our system with a humanitarian crisis that literally takes our agents off the border, puts them at a computer processing paperwork and then they run drugs through.”
Texas Rep. Chip Roy said, “your border is wide open. It is being exploited by cartels right now, today.” (RELATED: Biden Admin Won’t Expel Migrant Minors Despite Running Out Of Places To Hold Them)
Border Patrol agents are being pulled from the field and reassigned to processing centers leaving large sections of the border unpatrolled allowing access for cartels to smuggle narcotics into the U.S., Roy said. He added that cartels and human smugglers are exploiting immigrants who make the journey to the southern border.
“A strong border is pro-immigrant, a strong border is pro-America and yet our president is either completely oblivious to what’s going on, or he’s actually enabling and encouraging it,” Roy said.
The Biden administration’s immigration policies are resulting in child abuse because they are incentivizing unaccompanied minors to travel with cartels to the U.S. border, according to Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko.
“Even though President Biden is denying it, there is a crisis at the border,” Lesko said. She added that it is a humanitarian, health and national security crisis for the migrants and people who live in the communities where they are being released despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Georgia Rep. Jody Hice said, “we were told a couple of years ago that kids were in cages, that it was a moral catastrophe.” Trump inherited a flawed system from the Obama administration and left Biden with a “good situation at the southern border and in three short months he [Biden] has created an absolute disaster,” Hice added.
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