Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said on Tuesday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow that effective southern border security and interdiction of illicit drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border requires effective coordination with Mexican government authorities.
Ernst recently travelled to the San Diego Sector of the southern border and Mexico City, Mexico, with several congressional Republicans. She said the volume of vehicles and persons travelling across the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly the San Ysidro border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, requires coordination between the U.S. and Mexico to successfully secure.
“I think the only way that we can conquer fentanyl and the migrant challenge at the border is if we’re working with the Mexicans, and they’re only going to work with us if they can see us as being part of the solution, not just part of the problem,” Ernst said.
She added, “We’ve got to continue to improve our relations with Mexico. We do a lot of finger-pointing back and forth, but we have to have real solutions, and the Biden administration needs to create an interagency task force in Mexico to stop the flow of drugs.”
Mexico’s interest in securing the southern border includes interdiction of firearms smuggling involving criminal cartels, Ernst held.
She remarked, “This port of entry in San Diego is the world’s busiest land border crossing.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection refer to this border crossing as “the epicenter of fentanyl trafficking,” she added.
“At this point of entry, they have 34 lanes for vehicle traffic, and about 70,000 vehicles and 20,000 pedestrians cross every single day.”
Ernst shared her observations of the Biden administration’s ongoing policy of releasing apprehended border-crossing migrants into the U.S. interior.
“Border patrol said they feel more like Uber drivers,” she stated, “because they’re rounding people up, dropping them off, turning them loose into the United States.”
Internal emails at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), exclusively reviewed by Breitbart News, reveal that the agency is continuing to knowingly release COVID-positive border crossers and illegal aliens into the United States. https://t.co/4rB5KQ1f3N
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 27, 2022
The Iowa senator noted that migrants seeking entry to the U.S. across the southern border include foreign nationals from countries across the Pacific Ocean.
“While we were there, we were able to go out with CBP and we encountered migrants,” she said. “There was a group of migrants that had already been rounded up. It was the middle of the day, the migrants in this group were from Turkey and China. These are not people from Mexico or Central America.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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