Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) discussed on “Fox News Channel” the legislation he reintroduced to fund the border wall and help secure the southern border, the EL CHAPO Act.
Cruz argued it is “only right” that drug lord El Chapo’s “ill-gotten gains” go to solving the problem at the border because he gained from the leaky border.
“I happened to be reading at the time that the estimates to build a robust wall at the time were between 14 and $20 billion,” Cruz said of the first time he filed the EL CHAPO ACT. “At the same time, I read that the Department of Justice estimates of the global worth of El Chapo’s criminal network worldwide were roughly $14 billion. There is a natural and elegant symmetry that suggested itself. So I filed the EL CHAPO Act, which says all money criminally forfeited from El Chapo and from any other drug lord shall be used for border security and to build the wall.”
He continued, “And that means we can do this without spending even a penny of taxpayer money, but not only that: there is a justice to it. Those billions that El Chapo has were made trafficking illegally across the U.S. border, bringing narcotics across the border. And it is only right that those ill-gotten gains go to fixing the problems and stopping the next narco-traffickers.”
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