GOP Leaders: Joe Biden’s Border Lawlessness Is ‘Heartbreak’ for Migrants

Migrants who arrived in caravan from Honduras on their way to the United States, are seen
Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden has created a chaotic scramble at the border of poor Central American migrants, migrants from terror-producing countries, ruthless coyotes, and drug cartels, said GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

“It’s more than a crisis,” McCarthy said in a TV-ready press conference at the border:

This is a human heartbreak. The sad part about all this — it didn’t have to happen. This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There’s no other way to [describe this other] than a Biden border crisis … We want to find solutions. Before we even came here, I sent a letter to the president to work together to solve this problem … He doesn’t even acknowledge a letter.

McCarthy was joined by other GOP legislators.

“The winners are the human traffickers who know that because we don’t have a secure border that they can move these children [into the United States],” said Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX). “When we looked in their eyes today, what we saw was children who are being taken advantage of, exploited, on that 20 to 22 day trip [from Central America].”

“We have a problem, and we need to be part of the solution,” said Rep. Maria Salazar (D-FL):

We need to join forces and send a message that we cannot allow what’s happening on the border because it is our girls — from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua [are] the ones who are being raped. It’s our girls [who are the] children being trafficked. I’m not sure that you know that child sex-trafficking is one of the highest international crimes booming in this country. So I asked all of you to help me. I asked my community, not only [in] Miami, but across the country, that Hispanic Americans send a message to your representatives that we cannot have this happening on the border because the overwhelming majority of the people that are trying to come in belong to our group, to our ethnic group.

We need to stop this. We need to stop being pawns of the politicians in Washington and pawns of the traffickers who are trafficking with our children, our families, and our women. So, it’s a time for us to rise up and send a message, something that we haven’t done before, loud and clear to your representatives, whether Republicans or Democrats, it doesn’t matter. It’s a problem that belongs to all Americans, including the Hispanic Americans in this country.

Throughout President Donald Trump’s term, Democrats and their allies in the media sought to shift the migration debate away from Americans’ wages, jobs, opportunities, and American families and towards the concerns and priorities of young migrants. The resulting TV display of “kids in cages” proved so effective at motivating anger that Biden even brought up the issue during the presidential debates.

The language now being pushed by the GOP representative marks the conservative effort to motivate non-ideological swing voters to protest Biden’s policy of using border chaos to import more migrants via immigration law loopholes.

The Biden Administration’s border policy helps employers and investors by importing young migrants. The migrants can replace working Americans who ask for higher wages, request flexibility to raise their children, or who need accommodations to recover from illness:

“There is disorder at the border by executive order,” said Rep. John Katko (R-NY).

“I can tell you that with fentanyl coming across this border, more [American] kids are going to die,” said Rep. David Joyce (R-OH). “We’re making it unsafe for those [foreign] kids … because we don’t tell them that we are a country of immigrants, but we are also a country of laws.”
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), said “Talk to the migrants: They’ve been told, ‘Come on, come across,” from all over a host of countries.”

“What does that mean? Human costs, humanitarian costs. It means complete failure here at the border,” said Fleischmann, who is the top GOP member of the homeland security panel at the House committee on appropriations.

Micheal Cloud (R-TX) added, “We are a compassionate nation, but lawlessness is not compassion.”:

Aiding and abetting cartels is not compassion. Putting in policies that allow them to abuse women on the journey is not compassion. Allowing them to grow and be funded into a disabling force in these [Central American] nations that are trying to thrive and survive and create a thriving economy for their people is not compassion …

We have turned the people who’ve signed up to protect our border into the last mile delivery system of the cartel migrant human trafficking organization … We can fix this, we can secure our border, we can protect the lives of these people, and we can keep this nation strong and help push back the cartel influence in our nation and throughout Central and South America.

“We do not want to see families make dangerous treks across countries that they don’t understand and put themselves at risk,” said Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX).

“I’m going to ask President Biden to please pay attention because I’m talking straight to you now, sir,” said Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA).

“Allow us an audience with you. You have been misled …. [you are] endangering the children of God that are making this trip to our southern border under incredibly dangerous circumstances,” Higgins said.

Amid the expressions of sympathy for Central American migrants, McCarthy, however, added a brief reference to Americans’ worries about the migration’s impact on their jobs and wages, criminals, diseases, and drugs, saying, “We are better as a nation than this. This [crisis] is about the safety and security of our border. But it’s also about the opportunity that Americans want and the prosperity.”

But the GOP representatives did not talk about the fact that many young and old migrants recognize and accept the danger and trauma they will suffer to get into the United States. For example, many borrow money to hire coyotes, while knowing they will pay those smuggling debts by working U.S. jobs at low wages. Many of the illegal and abusive jobs are in the agriculture sector, such as at egg farms, where few GOP legislators call for intrusive inspections by DHS officers.

Several of the GOP representatives denounced Bidebn’s migration rush while proclaiming their support for legal immigration, especially of the many so-called “best and brightest” foreign graduates who compete for the university slots and careers needed by young American graduates.

“What we want to do is we want to attract the best and the brightest that this world has to offer, and we want them to come in a legal fashion,” said Cloud.

“We’re a land of immigrants,” said McCarthy.

“We should have immigration the right way,” said Katko, who has signed up to sponsor the agriculture amnesty bill, titled H.R.1603. The Democrats’ amnesty bill could replace most of America’s rural workforce with low-wage H-12A visa workers. Katko is the senior GOP member of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

But many polls and surveys show that legal immigration — like illegal migration — is unpopular among Americans, in part because it helps to shift money from pay packets and from small towns towards stock investors and major cities.

“I know the President is going to travel this week,” McCarthy said. “This is where he should bring Air Force One. This is where he should look to people in the eye. This is where he should talk to the border agents and let them know that this is beyond a crisis. He can continue to deny it, but the only way to solve it is to first admit what he has done.”

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