Jayapal: 'Blue States Already Share the Burden' of Border Because People 'Get Transported Across the Country'

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) responded to the argument by proponents of the migrant transports by Govs. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL) that blue states need to share the burden of the problems at the border by stating that “blue states already share the burden, because people do actually go and get transported across the country” but people aren’t “being tricked to get on a bus and then being shipped to places that aren’t ready to receive them.”

Host Jake Tapper asked, “They and their supporters say that they are trying to get attention to a border crisis, with two million arrests at the border in the last less than twelve months, which is a record. And they say that they need blue states to share the burden. What do you say to that?”

Jayapal responded, “Well, blue states already share the burden, because people do actually go and get transported across the country to different states. We have a lot of people that we welcome into Washington state, and we’re proud of that. But they don’t do it by being tricked to get on a bus and then being shipped to places that aren’t ready to receive them. That’s number one. Number two, Republicans have no interest in trying to fix this. Don’t forget Jake, that when Donald Trump was President, in March of 2019, he actually ended the support that we were giving to Central American countries to actually stop — help aid people in their countries so that they wouldn’t necessarily feel that they had to make the journey here. And because of that, he destabilized the assistance that we need to give as part of the holistic solution. Number two, he put in place all of these things that eliminated legal ways for people to come into this country. Let me just tell you that when we said to Haitians that they could actually come to the ports of entry and there was a legal way for them to be able to get into this country, then, all of a sudden, that’s what they did. 97% of Haitians do it that way. We’ve done that with Ukrainians.”

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