Joe Biden has been called out for his Mexican border policies by Republican politicians, including the governor of Texas, as the situation with illegal crossings into the US from the south worsens.
Jim Jordan, a Republican representative for Ohio's fourth congressional district, referred witheringly to the matter while on Sean Hannity's Fox News show aired on Thursday night.
“Today you cannot get into your Capitol, but anybody and everybody can get into your country,” he said.
The lawmaker went on to describe the state of affairs on the border as “not a crisis”, but “chaos”, because the Biden administration had reversed three of Trump’s key policies.
“Remain IN Mexico while you're being processed. They undid that,” he enumerated, as well as Biden's decision to ban deportations and to announce “to the world that we will not finish the wall."
The congressman added: "Those three things changed everything and you get this terrible situation causing harm to kids and women and all kinds of people on the border,” referring to a recent incident when smugglers dropped two children over the 14-foot border fence, leaving them alone in the New Mexico desert at night. Jen Psaki moved to blast this as “morally reprehensible”, but stopped short of describing how the Biden administration would prevent it from happening again.
“That's the Biden administration. That's how ridiculous, that is how crazy today's left is,” Jordan summed up.
Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff who also took part in the discussion, agreed, telling Hannity that Biden has essentially said “we are open for business”.
“Come on in. Send anybody from Central America and Mexico. We'll let you come in,” he added, noting that the Biden team “were warned” about the message that their laxer migration policies would send.
“President Trump had the right policy. We need to return to that. It will keep Americans safer and actually it will keep those coming across our southern border safer as well,” he explained.
Referring to multiple, often violent human smuggling incidents at the border, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, told Hannity that Biden had “created an open season for human traffickers, drug smugglers, cartels and gangs”.
“This problem is not going to be fixed until the Biden administration does its job to secure our border and to get this crisis under control,” Abbot maintained, expressing how shocked he was on Tuesday to see migrants moving en masse across his state, even in daylight. This, he said, was not commonplace just months earlier.
“It used to be people would come over at night. Not during the day,” he said, describing what he personally witnessed:
“In the middle of the day there were busloads after busloads after busloads of people loading buses who had just come across the border as we were flying over today,” Abbott said, adding that migrants were asking the federal government to repay them the money Texas injected into law enforcement on the border.
At Height of Border Crisis
Biden has appointed Vice-President Kamala Harris to be responsible for his administration’s efforts to resolve the matter, with the new president’s approach to it drawing increased attention ever since his swearing-in in January.
Border Patrol agents detain an average 5,000 migrants a day, and the Department of Homeland Security expects roughly 500,000 to 800,000 migrants to arrive during the 2021 fiscal year, which ends in September.
The number is expected to equal or even overtake the record tally of people who illegally crossed into the country in 2019, according to government data reported on by The Washington Post.