Exclusive — Trump-Endorsed Rep. Ted Budd: Sanctuary Cities Incentivize Dangerous Drugs, Human Trafficking

U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) said he was in a truck with Border Patrol agents witnessing the chaos at America’s southern border where agents had to get out and “arrest cartel members that were coming across.”

“Some of them were human trafficking. Some of them were bringing fentanyl and other drugs,” Budd said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, recounting his trip to the border late last year.

Budd, who has been to the border several times, told host and Breitbart News’s D.C. Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle about Border Patrol’s morale on the ground as well as the state of former President Donald Trump’s unfinished border wall.

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“[The agents] said, ‘we have to have an administration that has our back, and we don’t have that.’ And we were seeing tens of millions of dollars worth of steel, just laying there, millions of dollars worth of diesel equipment, just sitting there,” he said, noting that construction had been “idle since January 20, inauguration day.”

Since his trip, the Trump-endorsed congressman has set sanctuary cities in his sights, telling Breitbart News that cities who enable illegal immigration are responsible for accompanying crime and trafficking of various kinds. He also detailed a bill he reintroduced in late January called the Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act. The bill would allow the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants to sue sanctuary cities if that is where the crime occurred.

“These sanctuary cities are incentivizing this illegal traffic, which not only brings sometimes dangerous people, it definitely brings dangerous drugs and human trafficking here,” he said. 

A statement from Budd’s office released at the time of the bill’s reintroduction noted that the legislation was created in “direct response” to a “growing number of sanctuary jurisdictions across the nation…”

“… (Including North Carolina’s Buncombe, Cumberland, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, and Wake Counties) that either have official sanctuary policies or are refusing to comply with detainer requests and release notifications from the Department of Homeland Security,” the statement reads.

Just last week, Budd sat down with “Angel Families,” or families whose loved ones were the victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens. Budd said often in these cases, American lives are lost to traffic accidents or even shootings as a result of illegal immigration.

“Unfortunately, they are not in an uncommon situation. It’s all too common,” he said. 

Budd said he also hopes to tackle the copious amounts of fentanyl and drugs similar to fentanyl pouring over the southern border. On March 7, Budd joined several fellow Republicans in introducing the Save Americans from the Fentanyl Emergency (SAFE) Act, which would permanently schedule all fentanyl-related substances as Schedule 1 drugs.

“A lot of these drugs that are produced in China and sold through Mexico that come to the us, they aren’t actually fentanyl, but they’re similar drugs… ” he said. “…They aren’t on the Schedule 1 of these tough horrendous drugs, and so the SAFE Act takes those drugs and puts them on Schedule 1, which gives law enforcement the tools they need to hold these people in prison and in jail until they can get their justice and prison time.”

Budd’s office noted that fentanyl overdoses were the main cause of deaths for people ages 18-45 from 2020 to 2021. 

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.