During an interview with the “Fox News Rundown” podcast released on Thursday, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) stated that “the border is not under control” and that the Biden administration is simply moving unaccompanied minors “from one tent to another tent.”
Cuellar said, “So, basically, when they’re saying that the border’s under control, I mean, I think down in the valley, which I represent part of that, getting 2,000 to 2,500 people a day, 15% of it being unaccompanied kids and then maybe 36, 37% family units, and then 49% or so single adults with those large numbers, I would say that, with all due respect, the border is not under control.”
He continued, “Now, I will say they’re doing a better job moving the unaccompanied kids from one tent to another tent. What do I mean by that? Well, as you know, the focus was on the Border Patrol Donna center, the tent that they had there. What the administration has done now is just set up some tents next door and they’re run by HHS. So, they just move the kids from one tent to another tent, from the Border Patrol tent to the HHS tent and say, oh, we’re handling better.”
Cuellar later stated, “To say that the whole system was broken down, I would disagree. I mean, I disagreed with some of the policies that President Trump had like separating the kids from their families. … Title 42, which is still being used right now, is something that we could have — I support and something that we need to continue using right now. The MPP, the Migrant Protection Protocols program, I think that one, instead of just getting rid of that, I think we should have repurposed that. … So, those are some policies — or even the agreements we had with Central America and Mexico that got taken away and now they’re trying to do something else, trying to reach some sort of agreement. We should have not gotten rid of those agreements. We should have repurposed those agreements.”
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