Unsafe, unstable, uncontrolled — and unlikely to get much better under the policies of President Joe Biden.
That’s the summary Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw delivered as he toured the Texas-Mexico border over the weekend, sharing dramatic video of gaps in the border wall that are an open invitation to illegal immigrants.
“Here’s going to be the big takeaway from today and everything we’ve put out about what’s going on on the border. The situation is completely unstable: That’s the takeaway,” Crenshaw said in a video posted to Twitter on Saturday.
After some wind made whatever Crenshaw said unclear, he continued by noting that the lack of federal immigration enforcement means that “the state of Texas has to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to take up the slack.”
First update on the border: pic.twitter.com/42vsqbnUJK
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 6, 2021
“Texas has to fund … an operation to secure Texas, which means, in practical terms, they’ve got to fund camera systems. They’ve got to fund the personnel and the officers to go try to catch drug traffickers that are getting through because CBP is dealing with 100 migrant families at a time,” he said, referred to Customs and Border Protection agents.
“Why? Because the Biden administration basically decided that they don’t really want to enforce the law anymore, and that creates a magnet for more and more people to come across.”
After posting aerial shots of the border and a gap in the wall, Crenshaw said his point was to note “how much Texas has to foot the bill for the crisis we have at the border so often.”
In the air with Texas DPS on the border.
Below you can see how easy it is to cross. Migrants turn themselves in because they know they’ll just be released into the country.
This creates an incentive for thousands to keep crossing. pic.twitter.com/qwWDIoNKsb
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 6, 2021
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 7, 2021
“But there’s a reason for that, and this is sort of how it works. When Border Patrol gets overwhelmed with migrants, especially migrant families and unaccompanied children just turning themselves in because they know they’ll get released into the interior, what happens is, there’s huge swaths of territory that’s just left unchecked,” Crenshaw said.
“The Border Patrol cannot control the border so you need to rely on state authorities to do that. That’s why we were just out in the boat on the maritime unit. We were out in the helicopter and the aviation unit.
“Texas invests a lot of money in this, hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help out, and they’ve got a great working relationship with Border Patrol,” he said.
“Look, in these areas you’re seeing a huge spike. Just leaving the station just now, they’re calling it a crisis,” Crenshaw said. “It’s unprecedented. That’s a factual description. Over 6,000 migrants apprehended just this month in that one station … And they expect that to possibly double within the next month. That’s just the trend that they’re seeing.”
Visiting the Rio Grande City CBP station.
They are in full crisis mode.
Joe Biden must rescind the Executive Orders that caused this. pic.twitter.com/0cchpHmMiT
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 7, 2021
Crenshaw also noted that drug cartels use illegal immigrants as a means to manipulate Border Patrol.
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“What’s causing this? First of all, it’s important to note that drug smugglers play a huge part of this. They know how to distract CBP. They do it on purpose,” he said.
“They have an entire system in place. It’s part of their human smuggling network as well. Often, children get smuggled as a result of this, of labor smuggling. So there’s lots of different forms of human trafficking.
“But the point is, you’re distracting Border Patrol, and that means that it’s easier for the drug cartels to get their drugs in between,” Crenshaw said.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
