Jeh Johnson on the Border: ‘We Are Truly in a Crisis’

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Friday weighed in on the situation at the southern border, saying the United States was “truly in a crisis.”

Johnson, who served in the Obama administration, said he was invested in the apprehension numbers as part of his job and explained how 4,000 apprehensions and encounters in one day were unimaginable.

“When I was in office in Kirstjen Nielsen’s job at her desk, I’d get to work around 6:30 in the morning and there’d be my intelligence book sitting on my desk, the PDB, and also the apprehension numbers from the day before,” Johnson revealed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And I’d look at them every memory morning, it would be the first thing I’d look at, and I probably got too close to the problem.”

He continued, “[M]y staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number. And if it was above 1,000, it was a relatively bad number, and I was going to be in a bad mood the whole day. On Tuesday, there were 4,000 apprehensions. I know that a thousand overwhelms the system. I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like. So we are truly in a crisis.”

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